I was ‘up’ at the writers’ group last night. The protagonist in my ‘saga’ has survived atrocities in his home village and the fall of Namur and Antwerp, and has ended up at the quayside in Ostend, just as really happened to so many refugees back in 1914 (see the image). The submission got a light going-over – entirely deserved. At the moment, though, I consider it a minor miracle that I have managed to get my protagonist – and my story – so far.

If I have been quiet about sport for a while now, it’s because there have been so many fine sporting occasions in the recent past. Think back, for example, to the cliffhanger of a match between Wales and Ireland that brought the six nations to a thrilling close with a 15-17 scoreline, leaving Ireland deserving their Triple Crown and Grand Slam (their first since 1948). It may not always have been the best of rugby, but it was a magnificent sporting occasion. In the Champions League there have been some excellent matches, but the one that surely takes the biscuit (so far, at least) was the 4-4 draw between Chelsea and Liverpool. Talk about a goal fest! (I shall refrain from mentioning Liverpool’s 4-0 thrashing of Real Madrid – OK, then, I won’t refrain.) Just this Saturday, when I saw the UK Premier League half time scores on the internet, I consoled my Liverpool-supporting daughter that, with Man Utd 0-2 down against Spurs, Liverpool would be top of the table again. I spoke too soon. When I looked at the full time scores, Man Utd had won 5-2 – yes, that’s right; 5-2. Extraordinary stuff. And yet…. and yet… could this be Barça’s year? They have been beautiful to watch and surely have the most silkily dangerous front three… I am certainly looking forward to Tuesday and Wednesday evening.

Somehow I managed to read one-and-a-half books this weekend. The first, My Swordhand is Singing, by Marcus Sedgwick, was warmly recommended to me by my son and it is indeed a cracking good read. I won’t give too much away by saying that it’s all about nosferati and ‘hostages’ in Romania. Not recommended for the younger reader. I followed this up with half of Free Agent, by Jeremy Duns. This is exciting for two reasons. The first is that it is, quite simply, a cracking good read, set in the deepest recesses of the Cold War. The second, though, is that Jeremy was, until a few years ago, a member of my writers’ group. Like my (3 April) post about Edith, here was another project which I had seen evolving and maturing into a published work. Jeremy, who won a three-book deal, has already finished the second and researched the third. There’s hope for us all yet!

A while back now, the Guardian newspaper published an article with the title ‘Our guilty secrets: the books we only say we’ve read.‘ This immediately reminded me of the scene in David Lodge’s Changing Places, where two academics play a game called ‘Humiliation’. An obnoxious American professor of English literature wins the game by admitting he hasn’t read Hamlet, but because of that loses his job.  But the article also reminded me of my own not-so-guilty secret. One of my A level set texts in English literature was Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles. Well, here’s my secret; I read virtually every book by Thomas Hardy except Tess. In rapid succession I read Under the Greenwood Tree, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Wessex Tales and Jude the Obscure. My intention was entirely noble; I had wanted to read around the set text. But by the time I had read that little lot I had severely overdosed on Hardy and just couldn’t face yet another weighty tome. It took me another ten years before I finally managed to read Tess, but it didn’t matter. I passed the exam with flying colours – probably because I was able to lard my script with quotations from so many other works by the great Wessex author.

There is a witty piece in Tony Barber’s FT blog this morning about the use of the euro. He points out that, despite official frowning on unilateral adoption of the euro, Montenegro and Kosovo unilaterally adopted it on 1 January 2002, thus providing some protection from the financial crisis.  But the chief economist at Montenegro’s central bank does not recommend unilateral adoption of the euro by the Baltic states, no matter how much they might suffer. So, as Barber summarises: ‘a country that is outside the EU and outside the eurozone but uses the euro, is telling countries that are inside the EU but outside the eurozone not to use the euro, while the EU and eurozone let countries that are outside themselves use the euro but won’t extend the privilege to countries inside the EU but outside the eurozone.’ Got that?

In Italy, the telefonino reigns supreme. It doesn’t matter how important the meeting, nor how exclusive; some, if not all, of the participants will have their mobile phones switched on, they will receive calls (and they will answer them) and their ring tones will be loud. In Ligetti’s ‘anti-opera’, Le Grand Macabre (see 29 March post), the conductor used car horns. As I sat in the Palazzo San Giacomo, listening to the conference participants frequently interspersed with ring tones, it suddenly occurred to me that if Ligeti were still alive he would write mobile phone ring tones into his music.

Some time back (22 February) I posted an entry about a study on the institutional consequences of enlargement. One clear consequence, the study found, has been a steady increase in the size of the EU institutions’ traditional decision-making bodies. In the case of the EESC, its Bureau now stands at 39 members.  As one Bureau member put it, the Bureau can tend to function more as an assembly than as an executive body – and most if not all EU institutions have seen similar developments. A second strong consequence, therefore, has been the development of smaller, informal bodies within the formal ones. These new bodies act as filtering and preparatory bodies and provide strategic impetus. In the EESC’s case, the body concerned is known as the ‘enlarged Presidency’. It consists of the President, the two Vice-Presidents, the three Group Presidents and the Secretary General. Twice a year, the enlarged Presidency holds a seminar, traditionally away from the distractions of Brussels, and that is what took us to Naples. Thus, the formal agenda consisted of such strategic discussion points as the follow-up to the Programme for Europe; the Committee’s role and contribution to the forthcoming Employment Summit in Prague (6-7 May); preparations for the debate in next week’s extraordinary Bureau meeting with Felipe Gonzalez, President of a high-level Reflection Group on the Future of the EU; and the Committee’s relationship with and administrative arrangements for the national economic and social councils, the Committee’s Liaison Group with European-level civil society organisations, and the International Association of Economic and Social Councils and Similar Institutions (known by its French acronym, AICESIS). And that’s how we spent Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. As is par for the course, a lot of informal business was conducted ‘in the margins’ of the meeting. There was some culture in there also. We had two interpreters to ‘whisper’ in the ears of those of our participants who couldn’t understand French or English. One of them was the daughter of an archeologist who throughout her childhood had been the Head of the French Archeological Society’s Naples Office, and so she had known various places of antiquity – Pompei, Herculaneum, Paestum – as they were uncovered. It was fascinating listening to her childhood recollections over the breakfast table. After a quick buffet lunch, it was back to the airport and Brussels and an evening’s work with the files. Infuriatingly, the weather had been fine in the north.