After a heavy but productive Bureau meeting yesterday, it was on to the plenary session today, the last of the year. The highlight of this afternoon was the visit of Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Joëlle Milquet to present the balance sheet of the Belgian Presidency of the Council on employment, social policy and equal opportunities issues. Milquet quipped at the beginning that the key to a successful Presidency is the absence of a government at home but, as her detailed exposé then went on to prove, the true key to a successful Presidency is commitment and an understanding of the European Union’s decision-making processes – and Belgium has always had much of both. Two aspects of Milquet’s analysis interested me particularly. The first was her positive evaluation of the ‘trio’ mechanism for rotating presidencies. The importance of the traditional rotating presidency was supposed to have been diminished by the Lisbon Treaty’s innovations but, paradoxically, the reverse appears to have happened. The second was her insistence on a positive attitude towards immigration. Sensitive though the issue may be in a time of crisis, demography alone argues for such a positive case. A little ‘human’ observation of my own. As the Deputy Prime Minister spoke, her hands occasionally fluttered up, revealing a streak of white paint on the underside of her little finger – you know, the one place you miss when you are scrubbing your hands after a bit of home decorating….

At a recent writers’ workship meeting I was enthusing about Leonardo Di Caprio’s acting skills and LG recommended I should watch 1993 film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, so we did, this evening, and were not disappointed. A young Di Caprio (19) plays a boy with developmental disabilities and his performance is surely up there close to Dustin Hoffman’s Rainman. Johnny Depp is excellent as his older brother. This is a film (from the 1991 novel of the same name by Peter Hedges) about the profound ennui of middle America, set in an imaginary town, the aptly-named Endora, where men and fathers commit suicide and mothers seek release in over-eating or having affairs. Salvation comes for Depp’s Gilbert Grape in the form of Becky (Juliette Lewis), who arrives with her grandmother in a trailer, but not before Di Caprio’s Arnie leads his brother a merry dance. Whilst we empathise with Gilbert Grape’s predicament, we never lose sympathy for Arnie. Two fine performances from two fine actors before Titanic and Pirates of the Caribbean imprisoned them in the sticky amber of major stardom.

This evening I propped myself in an armchair and, at the suggestion of N° 1 sprog, we watched a Belgian film, La Régate (2008), directed by Bernard Bellefroid. It was a gem of a film (and one which, I suppose, would not have been made without support from the Media programme). It is an all-too-plausible portrait of a drunken, single, wastrel father’s physical and psychological abuse of a son who, throughout all of the violence and the broken dreams, remains loyal and loving until the scars cannot be hidden anymore. It is set by the Meuse and the son’s passion and skill, skulling, provides for original scenes and scenery. It is excellently acted. Joffrey Verbruggen, as the abused son, and Thierry Hancisse, as the abusive father, turn in excellent performances. I would warmly recommend the film only don’t watch it if you are feeling dark about the human condition…

I have slept most of today and I suppose that could be called an advantage for a start, but there are others. Gazing out occasionally on the beauty of Brussels’ rooftops under the snow is another, listening non-stop to classical music on BBC Radio Three a third. Gradually catching up on newspaper reading is a fourth, reading all those Wiki-leaks in detail a fifth. I was sad to learn that Britain would not be hosting the World Cup again, mainly for my children, but who could begrudge Russia a crack at the whip? Gradually, too, as I have cleared away all the ‘pending’ stuff I have had a chance to start writing up some of my speaking notes. Last but not least, it feels pleasantly illicit to be at home and to see my family at times when normally I would not. I definitely do not recommend sinusitis and I am still feeling very sorry for myself, but I have to admit that being sick is not all dark.

I-sinusitis. Note realistic colouring

Over the past two years I have worked my through lumbago and sciatica and any number of colds and infections but over the past six weeks I have come up against a tougher opponent – sinusitis. I had had something lingering for over a month but yesterday things took a turn for the worse, so I went to the doctor’s and was diagnosed, as I had suspected, with sinusitis. She gave me antibiotics and the usual blasting about taking it seriously. The problem was that today I was supposed to be leaving for Tunis, for an administrative board meeting of AICESIS (the international association of economic and social councils and similar institutions). I had a dreadful night but packed my bag this morning nevertheless and came into work. A few hours later it was clear that things were getting worse and so, much to my regret, I had no alternative but to slope off to bed, like a plane being wheeled into a hangar for essential repairs, and leave the antibiotics to do their work.

This evening I gave the seventh John Fitzmaurice Memorial Lecture. John, a European Commission official, a prolific academic author and a founding member of the Brussels Labour branch, was in turns my academic mentor, boss, colleague, comrade and dear friend. He passed away suddenly in August 2003. It was a great pleasure and privilege to be able to pay tribute to him. Neil Kinnock delivered the first memorial lecture and the subsequent lecturers have been Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Geoff Hoon, Julian Priestley, Margot Wallstrom and John Monks. Until the end, John and I would have lunch about once every six weeks (our last lunch was just one month before he died), and we would use these occasions to bounce ideas for articles and books off of one another. I deeply miss those lunches, so I asked the audience to pretend they were John and bounced some ideas off of them. My chosen theme was the rise of Euroscepticism and the risk of a conflation with extremism. Basically, I think we have much to learn from American politics in the mid-1800s, when permanent political parties first started to form at the federal level. These have always remained loose coalitions and maybe that’s the way party politics in the EU will evolve in the longer run, with a loose coalition of pro-integration parties and a loose coalition of more Eurosceptical parties. I’ll post a link to the speech once I have written it up. Here’s that link.

Continuing our children’s education in the great film classics (well, that’s our excuse, anyway), tonight we watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I forget how many times I have seen this film. It’s always enjoyable. There’s the wonderful chemistry between Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the tragic-comic plot, some spectacular scenery lovingly shot, a great song (Raindrops keep falling on my head) and some brilliant one-liners: ‘you keep thinking, Butch; that’s what you’re good at’; ‘I don’t know where we’ve been and we’ve just been there’; and ‘Who’s the best lawman?’ ‘You mean the toughest or the easiest to bribe?’ What struck me more this time around was the darker, elegiac, allegoric side to the film. The cheerful and charismatic outlaws are inexorably hunted down just as the native Indians had been before them. The evil of the outlaws is extirpated but so is their fancy-free life and cheerful innocence. Civilisation is right and inevitable but it’s also boring… It’s strange to think that, before Redford landed the part (which made his career), Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Jack Lemmon and Newman himself were all considered for the role of the Sundance Kid. It’s impossible now to imagine it being anybody else.

This evening we went to Les Halles de Schaerbeek to see a double bill from the Company Moussoux-Bonté. The main piece, Les Corps Magnétiques, is a brilliant idea that somehow fell disappointingly flat. Besuited men and party-dressed women in high heels strike various poses on the stage, each with a cocktail glass in hand. Couples and groups form and unform, mimicking the dynamics of a party, perhaps. But it rapidly becomes clear that there are deeper and darker forces at work. There are rejections and acts of dominance and submission. People crawl across the stage or storm off of it. It is, say the programme notes, ‘between humour and oddity, an allegory about the impossible and necessary community.’ So far, so good, and the piece, if it had lasted ten minutes, would have been very powerful. But by the conventions of our day and age the main billing had to last longer and, the longer it lasted, the more it seemed to repeat itself and the less force it had. About half way through the piece the dancers strip to bathing costumes and bikinis and go through it all again. I don’t want to pan this piece and I am glad I saw it, but the contrast came with the first half of the bill, Kefar Nahum, where Nicole Moussoux herself performs a brilliant mime on a darkened stage, bringing to life a series of everyday objects. Put it this way, if you could only see one, take the Kefar Nahum.

Design = http://www.johnbaldwingraphics.com/

This evening we went to see the Irish Theatre Group’s production of Brian Friel’s Translations, directed by Nick Roche. It’s a brilliant piece of theatre, leaving the audience, as the publicity succinctly declared, ‘to ponder on how we communicate with one another, between countries, between siblings, between the generations, between the sexes, between cultures and between languages’. It is also, I might add, a powerful piece of writing against colonisation and cultural imperialism (every Englishman should see it). We had an additional reason for going. The part of Hugh was played by a member of my writers’ workshop, John Boyle, who played the same part in the ITG’s first production of the play in 1983, when the playwright himself was among the audience. The whole cast were excellent and once again I was left thinking how lucky we are to live in a city with such a rich cultural agenda.

Liberation (1940)?

I spent all day today in a senior management seminar. I started the opening session with a plea for what I journalistically entitled a ‘cultural revolution’. One of my basic arguments was that collectively the EU’s institutions had not yet fully understood the consequences of the last two waves of enlargement (2004 and 2007). We have a fierce attachment to the notion of a European public service. We know how difficult it is to compete in the international job market for high-performing polyglot staff. We therefore understand why our officials receive the salaries they do and work in the conditions that they do. But many of our members, particularly those coming from Central and Eastern European countries, understandably cannot avoid making comparisons with conditions back home and the conditions that used to exist back home until very recently. After my talk there was a table round in which participants agreed with the basic analysis. But the whole atmosphere in the room changed electrically when a Latvian deputy director, IS, took the floor and briefly recounted the world which she had known. When the Soviets invaded Latvia in 1940 they split up former grand townhouses into small flats. IS’s parents lived in half of one room. Their half was demarcated by a wardrobe and a curtain. All services – toilet, kitchen – were communal, shared with three other families. There was no bathroom. Washing was in a bowl of hot water. Because of theft, they kept their refrigerator with their food in their half room. IS was an only child. It was impossible to have another until, ten years later, they obtained an additional room, when IS’s brother was born. I have very briefly summarised IS’s account. This is a world which she knew. Indeed, she has lived more of her life under the old regime than under the new one. It was a perfectly timed and delivered reminder of just how lucky we are.