To La Monnaie this evening to see a new production of Giacomo Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, with a mise-en-scène by Mariusz Trelinski. The evening’s performance was hit by the illness of Brandon Jovanovich, playing Des Grieux, but he nevertheless soldiered on, miming the part on stage, whilst a brave and excellent Italian tenor, whose name we didn’t catch and who had been flown in the same morning from London, sang the part from the shadows under the proscenium arch. He did a very good job (and if somebody can send me his name I’ll put it in this post). Eva-Maria Westbroek sung the title role brilliantly and Carlo Rizzi conducted with aplomb. We had our doubts about Trelinski’s production. He chose to place the action in an evocation of a cross between a metro and a London underground station, with its hints of the endless sweep and flow of life and humanity. For some reason, it didn’t quite come off.  Nevertheless, the production was vindicated by an extraordinarily powerful and unforgettable portrayal of the roll call of the courtesans (Act III) with the parade of half-naked women, staggering, bound hands above their heads, lurching repeatedly towards their awful destiny, heavily redolent of the slave trade with which the Americas were already familiar and of the horrors twentieth century Europe would all too soon know. It is an image that stays in the mind.

Today I had lunch with a former trainee and co-author who since gone on to good and great things. We both have families and at one stage we started talking about the benefits of keeping pets for children. And that is how I learned about triops, for my friend keeps triops (from the Greek for ‘three eyes’). Considered ‘living fossils’ triops have a fossil record that reaches back to the late Carboniferous, 300 million years ago. One extant species, Triops cancriformis, has hardly changed since the Jurassic period (approximately 180 million years ago). Put another way, triops were swimming around in pools of water when the first dinosaurs started to roam the earth and they are still here. Compare and contrast with homo sapiens, which first became anatomically distinct about 200,000 years ago. As this enthusiast, Chip Hannum, puts it on his website here, “In the time that the triops have been here, the Earth has undergone countless changes. The land has gone from a single super continent, Pangea, to the seven continents of today. The climates have cycled hot and cold and back again many, many times. Almost every animal species alive today has evolved since the triops appeared on the scene. Thousands of more species evolved within that time, thrived for a bit, and were driven exinct for one reason or another. The triops have been there through it all.They are, in every sense of the word, biological marvels of survival and niche adaptation. They have done more than just survive, though. Today, triops are found on every continent except Antarctica and there are at least 15 known species.” So, if you want to keep things in perspective, keep some triops.

I nipped to London and back today to visit a good friend. Having taken the cheap red-eye Eurostar, I had some time to burn early on a Sunday morning in one of my favourite pastimes – wandering around London. And that is how I came across this blue plaque, at 21 Tavistock Place. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lived in this house in 1908, close to the British Museum reading room, where he was preparing materials for his writing on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, published the following year. As this essay recounts, Lenin was a frequent visitor to London. He liked the city and would take long rides on the top of the bus or visit the zoo. (London became an important haunt of the exiled revolutionaries, particularly once police persecution made Brussels unviable. Stalin and Trotsky were also frequent visitors.) Now then, here is a Trivial Pursuits question: what is the connection between Lenin, Bob Dylan and a pub on the Gray’s Inn Road called The Water Rats? Answer: the pub, which used to be called The Pindar of Wakefield, was Lenin’s local; as The Water Rats it swapped from music hall to modern music and it was here, in December 1962, that Bob Dylan played his first ever British gig.

Today I journeyed with a mini-bus load of art lovers to the Louvre Gallery’s new extension, built amid abandoned slagheaps in the post-industrial landscape of Lens in northern France. The building itself is low and clad in shimmering glass and polished steel that reflects the low, grey skies so typical of this region. This minimalistic exterior has its critics but there can be few of the interior. The main exhibition hall in particular is a generously-proportioned (120 metres long!), well-lit space, with a gentle incline that has enabled the exhibitors to trace out a time line on one of those buffed steel walls, starting with ancient antiquity and accelerating through to the nineteenth century. My eye and imagination were caught in particular by a stylised statuette from Afghanistan, dated between 2300 and 1700 B.C., of a lady wearing a woolen robe (picture) that could have been made in the 1920s. I only have the space for one illustration, but another figure that caught my eye was a small bronze winged Mesopotamian statue of Pazuzu, King of the wind demons and evil demons, dating from 800-700 B.C. The space finishes with Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, which is quite a show stopper in its own right. The other main exhibition space sported a temporary exhibition about the Renaissance. Slightly more traditional in its presentation, Renaissance nevertheless provided some exquisite and intensely moving exhibits. These included a terrifying recumbent statue of Catherine de Medici, rough-hewn in marble by Girolamo della Robbia in 1565-6, and reportedly abandoned because the subject could not bear to see della Robbia’s imagined version of what she might look like when old, emaciated and dead. Two smaller exhibition spaces, a dining area and a library finish off the ground floor and a spiral staircase takes the visitor down to a mezzanine floor overlooking a storage and restoration department. The museum is a good twenty-minute walk from the centre of town and it is difficult to see how it will help regenerate its surroundings (in the way the Pompidou at Metz is, for example), but as a museum and exhibition space it is beautiful and well worth the trek.

Today the management board of the European Economic and Social Committee devoted a morning to a seminar away from the office (but not too far away), addressing a number of strategic themes. The Committee’s current President, Staffan Nilsson, is approaching the end of his two-and-a-half year mandate. The head of his Private Office, Rolf Eriksson, gave an analysis of how he saw things. This was followed by a reflection on emerging trends towards ever-closer interinstitutional cooperation in a period of sustained austerity. The latter part of the seminar and the ensuing lunch were devoted to an exchange of views with the next President of the Committee, Henri Malosse, about his view of things and his intentions and ambitions. Henri was accompanied by the future Director of his Private Office, Rudy Aernhoudt (to Henri’s right in the picture). The earlier discussions and the later exchanges formed a harmonious ensemble, for we were all agreed on the challenges faces the European Union and the need to connect better, much, much better, with its citizens

Gustave Holst’s Neptune, The Mystic, the seventh planet in his Planets Suite, was an early example of a fade-out ending. In the score, Holst wrote that the women’s choruses are ‘to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bars of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed,’ and that the final bar (for the choruses alone) is ‘to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance.’ His daughter, Imogen, wrote about this ‘unforgettable’ ending, with the voices fading ‘until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence’. I have heard this performed once before live and those ethereal voices at the end are indeed very special. The problem is that the singers are kept hidden away for the forty-to-fifty minutes of the Suite and so, I imagine, are quite an expensive luxury. So when I saw that there would be a performance at Bozar with choir I grabbed some tickets and tonight took three teenage boys (including N° 2 sprog) along for the experience. The boys turned out to be quite discerning. I had thought bellicose Mars would be their favourite, but for one it was Jupiter and his jollity, and for another the mysticism of Neptune. The choir was definitely there in the beginning. After three intense Skryabin piano solos, performed by Bernard Lemmens, we were treated to Skryabin’s Prometheus, the poem of fire. The splendid performance ended with the Belgian National Orchestra, under the baton of Stefan Blunier, in full cry together with the full-blooded voices of the Choirs of the European Union. Moreover, the piece was accompanied by the kinetic paintings of Norman Perryman, created live and projected onto a screen above the choir. At times organic, at times astronomic, the paintings were a perfect accompaniment. After the interval I sat down and prepared myself for those etheral voices. The conductor and the orchestra did a brilliant job. Mars was every bit as bellicose as it should be, Mercury sprightly, Saturn stately and Neptune… Well, Neptune was wonderful except that either there was no choir anymore or the voices were so etheral that we couldn’t hear them. Now, it could have been an acoustic trick (we were sitting quite near to the orchestra), or it could have been that they performed the piece as scored for orchestra alone, but I couldn’t hide my disappointment. It was a wonderful evening, but if those etheral voices had been there, it would have been perfect. You can hear a version of what I missed here.

This morning I accompanied EESC President Staffan Nilsson and Vice-President Anna Maria Darmanin to the Belgian Royal Palace for the King’s annual New Year’s reception for the Presidents, Vice-Presidents and high-ranking officials in the EU institutions or those working with them. Once everybody has been presented individually to the King and Queen the guests assemble for an aperitif while the King and the Queen talk more privately with the Presidents of the main institutions and other selected guests. I am therefore proud to show you, in the photograph, our Vice-President, Anna Maria Darmanin, together with the new Maltese Commissioner, Tonio Borg, talking with Queen Paola. More generally, as I have written in previous posts on the topic, the royal reception is an excellent occasion to catch up on contacts and to ‘network’.

In this afternoon’s plenary session I was given a generous and moving gift by Béatrice Ouin (French, Workers’ Group). Béatrice had recently been to the Palais de Beaux Arts here in Brussels  to listen to a presentation by two veteran MEPs, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Guy Verhofstadt, of their jointly-authored book, For Europe! ‘Europe,’ says the blurb, ‘must once and for all get rid of the navel-gazing of its nation-states. A radical revolution is needed. A large European revolution. And a European federal Union must emerge. A Union that enables Europe to participate in the postnational world of tomorrow. By laziness, cowardice and lack of vision, too many of our Heads of State and Government prefer not to see what is at stake. Let’s wake them up. Let’s confront them with their impotence. And give them no respite until they have taken the European way, the way to a Europe of the future, towards a Europe for Europeans. The era of empty summits and statements is over. Now is the time for action.’ As Béatrice put it to me, ‘If I hadn’t offered it, you wouldn’t have found the time to read it; now you must!’ Her dedication, which I proudly repeat here, is to ‘le plus européen de mes amis britanniques’. Thank you, Béatrice!

I set off from the office to my writers’ workshop on my bicycle this evening. A few snowflakes were fluttering around lazily, but nothing in particular to worry about, I thought. The evening passed off well and, as usual, we shifted to a nearby brasserie for a drink and a bite to eat. The snow was now falling a little more purposefully, but the roads were reasonably clear. At ten-thirty I set off home. I pedalled the first part, and then some serious weather set in. I don’t know if there can be a downpour of snow, but within a few minutes the previously clear roads were clogged and I knew I would have to wheel my bike the rest of the way home. The snow would have been enough, but then a powerful, swirling wind blew up. The snow flakes, driven forcefully, stung my eyeballs and since I didn’t have goggles or glasses, I had to keep my eyes half-closed. By the time I got to the top of the rue de la Loi I realised that I was navigating in a fully-fledged blizzard. The snowfall had already reduced visibility, but the swirling wind was disorienting so that, daft though this sounds, there were moments when I felt almost as though I was lost – and this was on rue de la Loi (where no cars were passing anymore). Conditions away from the exposed upper road were better and I soon made my way home, but the scribbler in me realised that I had just been given a free insight into how easy it is to get lost in a snowstorm. Even if you can see, familiar landmarks are obscured or buried and the driving snow means that you can rarely look up to, or see, the horizon. A swirling wind completes the disorientation.

To the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille for two contemporaneous exhibitions, one on the theme of contemporary artistic representations of the tower of Babel, and the other on the theme of ‘fables in the Flemish sixteenth century landscape’. The revelation, for me, in the Babel exhibition was a number of young Chinese artists (Yang Yongliang and Zenjen Du in particular) working particularly in sophisticated video installations, such as Infinite Landscape, which take and re-imagine old Euro-centric ideas and forms, such as landscape itself. Which brings me to the second exhibition. Leaving aside the fact that it was badly laid out, so that on a busy Sunday the crushes around the Bosches and the Breughels made ordered viewing impossible, this was also a rich and pedagogic experience. Landscape in painting developed out of a need to fill in the background behind the representations of saints, the nativity, and so on. The great Flemish artists turned landscape painting into an art form in its own right, as the many paintings in this exhibition illustrated. An unexpected discovery came in the basement of the museum, where there is a huge collection of eighteenth century scale models of fortified Flemish cities. Even without the two exhibitions, the visit to the museum would have been well worthwhile.