In the evening took the flight to Prague. Tomorrow we have an extraordinary meeting of the Bureau of Group III (various interests). We are staying up near the castle. The city, and that spot, mean a lot to me. In tomorrow’s post I’ll explain why. After dinner, offered by the Czech Chamber of Agriculture, I met up with my younger brother, who lives and works in Prague. I simply love this aspect of Europe, that you can feel at home in so many different places, different countries, different cities.

I invited all seventeen women colleagues in managerial positions in the EESC to lunch to discuss an article entitled ‘Women and the Vision Thing’ that had been published in the Harvard Business Review. This was great fun; a good atmosphere and an excellent discussion from which I learnt a lot. I have nailed my colours to the mast when it comes to getting more women into managerial positions in the Committee. As I told them, whether or not they agree with the article’s argument that women managers are perceived as scoring lower on ‘envisioning’, they should have one vision; that one day one of the women at that lunch will be Secretary General.

In the afternoon our President, Mario Sepi, presided over a meeting of what we call ‘the enlarged Presidency’. This consists of the President, the two Vice-Presidents, the three Group Presidents, and the SG. The one subject on the agenda was the Committee’s forthcoming ‘Programme for Europe’, which is designed to provide a sort of civil society manifesto in the run-up to the European Parliament elections. The enlarged Presidency seminar had met to fine tune preparations and procedures, since what the Committee is seeking to do is, by its own standards, a novelty and, in procedural terms, quite revolutionary. Like all the institutions, the EESC is finding ways to act or react swiftly, but such rapidity requires big doses of discipline and collegiality. Both were on display this afternoon.

A working lunch with the Swedish Permanent Representative, Christian Danielsson, and the EESC’s Group III President, Staffan Nilsson, about the forthcoming Swedish Presidency. Danielsson and I recognised each other from the days when he was working in Anita Gradin’s cabinet and I was in the Commission’s Secretariat General. Like the French and the Czechs before them, the Swedes will have a large number of challenging dossiers to deal with but their thinking is already impressively clear.

I spent most of this Tuesday in preparatory meetings (with my counterpart in the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, and with our members in the delegation) and then in a meeting of the Political Monitoring Group, a meeting that lasted most of the afternoon. This must be a rare body in interinstitutional terms. It is composed of members from both the CoR and the EESC and its remit is to oversee the workings of the cooperation agreement between the two Committees, particularly with regard to the so-called Joint Services (notably translation and logistics), where the two Committees have decided to realise considerable economies of scale by pooling their resources in a joint structure. The meeting went very well and this is in itself a tribute to all the officials in both Committees who are determined to make the Agreement work. I never tire of pointing out that this revolutionary arrangement is the way of the future.

In the afternoon, at the kind invitation of its President, Colin Lustenhouwer, I was invited before a meeting of the Association of Former EESC Members. The basic spirit of the Association is, I would say, once an EESC member, always an EESC member. Our former members are ambassadors for the Committee and remain committed to the ’cause’ of civil dialogue, so I welcomed the chance to spell out my vision for the Committee and future relations between the members and their administration.

At lunchtime I was asked to say a few welcoming words for the ‘Papas no Mamas’, a (I quote) ‘swinging male choir from Finland’.
They were actually very good, with a repertoire ranging from classical gospel and negro spirituals through to Finnish pop songs, serenades, hyms and children’s songs.

They had been brought to the Committee by our Vice-President, Seppo Kallio.

Their website is here.
 
 

A graphic illustration of providing translation into and out of twenty two languages was provided by my colleagues in the Translation Directorate the other day. It speaks for itself, really.

Scanning the obituaries the other day (you know; we check the dates of birth to see whether our generation is starting to die off), I saw that Chris Finnegan had died. Who he? you ask. He was a British boxer who won the middleweight gold medal at the 1968 Mexico Olympics and, strange as it may seem, I occasionally drank a pint with him and his brother, Kevin, in the pubs on Uxbridge High Street. Like many a place at the end of the London underground, Uxbridge was once a sleepy village. I used to get the Met out there as a youngster and then, in my late teens, we would sometimes head out that way for parties. As a student, I’d get the bus up to Oxford from there and it still had that sleepy feel to it. One way or another, I spent quite a bit of time in the pubs on the High Street, and that’s where I met the Finnegan brothers. At first, it was just a nodding acquaintance, but over time we got talking and, mainly, joking. They had a reputation as being hard men and you surely wouldn’t have wanted to get on the wrong side of them. My long hair did not go down a bundle with Chris but he liked nothing better than a drink and a joke. I like to think that, at the time, I was pretty good at both of those. The funny thing is, though, that I had completely forgotten about that passing acquaintance and, I am sure, if I hadn’t happened to see the obituary I would never have thought of Chris and the Finnegan brothers ever again.

It was bike Friday again. This time I went off to our Bertha von Suttner building to fly the flag and sit the obligatory quizz. I won a dinky little saddle bag for myself but I didn’t get all of the answers. For example, can children ride on the pavements? The answer is ‘yes’, but the wheels must be 50 cms or less in diameter. So now you know.