We have been trying, and failing, to get into Homeland, another highly-recommended and very popular American television series. Its basic premise – an inversion of the ‘just-because-you’re-not-paranoid-doesn’t-mean-they’re-not-after-you’ theme – is full of potential. Clare Danes’s portrayal of a CIA officer with bi-polar disorder is excellent. But you can only get hooked on this series if you completely suspend all reasonable belief and are prepared to swallow moral repugnance at a simplistic and mono-cultural portrayal of the Islamic faith and the Arab peoples, ends-justify-the-means no-holds-barred voyeurism and – apologies for the cliché – gratuitous sex and violence. Watching all of this made us feel increasingly uneasy. Compare and contrast this with The West Wing, which also deals with terrorism and espionage at times but quite deliberately eschews facile representations of complex phenomena and resolutely rejects playing to prejudices, let alone confirming them. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the out-of-series episode filmed less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, Isaac and Ishmael. That such a nuanced, balanced and fair treatment of America’s Arabs and Muslims could be spliced into a popular series shortly after all the horror and trauma of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and UA Flight 93 is a truly magnificent example of American wisdom. I only wish I could write the same about Homeland.

Today, out walking the dog near Berthem, I saw a phenomenon I have quite frequently read about but never before seen. The collective noun for rooks is ‘a parliament’. This is reportedly because rooks have been known to gather in fields and listen to one of their fellows apparently speechmaking. More far-fetched stories claim that on occasion rooks will ‘try’ one of their number for wrongdoings and even execute (through a mob attack) the unfortunate bird if found guilty. Well, today I didn’t see a rook trial and nor did I see an image quite as perfect (the ‘speaker’ perched on a post) as that in John Samuel Raven’s picture, but I did nevertheless see a rooks’ parliament. In this case the birds had congregated in a frozen field and formed a rough circle and in the middle of the circle one bird was repeatedly cawing and crying, as if giving a speech. I would have taken a picture but the dog came running up and they of course  flew away. Rooks are notoriously gregarious birds, living in colonies, and there must be some sort of explanation for this phenomenon.

The EESC’s Enlarged Presidency, consisting of the President, the two Vice-Presidents, the three Group Presidents, meets before every Bureau meeting and plenary session in order to ‘prepare and facilitate’ the Committee’s work. In addition, the enlarged Presidency also meets occasionally outside this monthly rhythm in order to discuss more general political issues. Today the enlarged Presidency met, productively as always, and I can, as always, say little about its agenda. However, I do like to record the fact that it met because that enables me to publish, as always, an image of a truly enlarged President, William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States of America and such an enlarged President that he supposedly got stuck in a White House bathtub and could only be freed through the liberal application of butter.

I was sad to learn about the passing away yesterday of former German Social Democrat MEP Dieter Rogalla. After studying law he began a career as a national customs official before joining the European Commission in 1961, where he worked variously in the Customs Union Directorate General, and the Human Resources (in charge of staff regulations) and Development DGs before joining, and heading, the Legal Service. He became a Member of the European Parliament in 1981 and was re-elected in 1984 and 1989. He was a longstanding and distinctive member of the Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and Industrial Policy and that is how I came to know him, since I shadowed the Committee for the European Commission’s Secretariat General for almost seven years. Rogalla’s trademark was a small red-and-white painted model of a customs barrier, which he would lovingly take out of his briefcase and put on his parliamentary desk every day, with the barrier up. For Rogalla, as a gamekeeper turned poacher, was an indefatigable campaigner for ending national frontiers and harmonising taxes. He taught economics at his alma mater, Münster University, in parallel with his parliamentary career and in retirement practised the law. But his other great passion was cycling. In 1982 he founded Eurotour, a cycling tour through several member states with much symbolic crossing of frontiers. Rogalla last participated himself in 2009 at the age of 82! As an MEP Rogalla practised a gruff and growly attitude to the Commission, and I was frequently the target of his grumbling as, post Single European Act, my institution failed to dismantle barriers and frontiers with sufficient speed for his liking. I never took anything personally and he was always kind to me. I remember him as a good European, beavering away at the creation of a true single market in those heady days when the market was being built more than managed.

Tradition in the European Economic and Social Committee has it that each New Year the President and the Secretary General invite all staff to a meeting for a general exchange of views, followed by a reception. This year’s meeting took place this afternoon/evening. There are never many questions on such occasions, which I take as a sign of relative good health; if people were unhappy, I am sure we would hear about it! But this year Staffan decided to ginger things up a little. In the first place, he checked whether I remembered the six priority policies of his Presidency (dialogue and participation, sustainability and growth, solidarity and development). Staffan being Staffan, he had tipped me off beforehand and my over-perfect recitation, presidential programme in hand, caused great mirth. And then he distributed envelopes among his audience. Each contained a question to him, prepared by his private staff. They were not all the easiest of questions, but Staffan had no trouble in answering them with aplomb. Then, at the end, it was my sad duty to thank Staffan for his presidency and good stewardship of the Committee, for this was his last such meeting.

The man has done it again! On his 66th birthday and after a decade of silence the reclusive David Bowie, supposedly long since retired after a health scare (and creative burn out?), suddenly and unexpectedly launches a new single, Where Are We Now?, with an album, The Next Day, to follow in March. How Bowie managed to write and record an album over two years without any rumours leaking to his ever-nostalgic fan base is told in this article. The silence and the surprise are classic Bowie showmanship and enjoyable in their own right but, even better, the single is very good and, according to the producer, Tony Visconti, is the most low-key song on the album. The good news doesn’t stop there. This is no last hurrah. Bowie has reportedly recorded 29 songs and even on the De Luxe edition of the new album there will only be 17 tracks, so at least one more album will follow. As Visconti puts it; “You know, he’s an artist, he can’t sit on his creativity forever. You could tell from the beginning that the songs were stunning even in primitive form. They were obviously things that had built up over the past 10 years, sketches he had all along.”

We seldom ‘watch television’. The ubiquitous internet provides constant news updates and DVDs provide films and series when we want to watch for entertainment. But occasionally the good old BBC has the power to attract me back to the small screen and that was very much the case this evening with a BBC 2 documentary about polar bears. In The Polar Bear Family and Me wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan follows a polar bear family over three seasons in Svalbard. This evening’s programme included extraordinary footage of a polar bear trying to work out a way of getting at Buchanan has he filmed from the inside of  an ‘ice cube’ (a protective perspex cage). You can see the scene here. It is the equivalent, I suppose, of cameramen being lowered in steel cages into shark-infested waters. I doubt whether this sort of programme would get made if it were not for public-funded television and yet it is top-notch entertainment, as well as highly educational.

I returned to work already last week but the Committee got back to its normal rhythm today. Monday mornings always begin with a meeting of the management board. I can’t resist writing this short post because, as the accompanying picture shows, my initiative to turn the management board into a relatively paperless meeting is rapidly taking hold. The laptops are intrusive and the next step will be a gradual migration to tablets, as their prices come down and colleagues realise their advantages. There will always be some paper (for example, it is easier to consult an A3 spreadsheet on paper than on a screen) but habits can rapidly change. The big advantage of having a laptop or tablet in front of you is that e-mails can be consulted less obviously than by using a smart phone. I don’t mind this at all. Colleagues are smart enough to know when they have to be listening and when they can sneak a look and, of course, they gain the time they would otherwise have lost reading the e-mails once they got back to their offices.

My aunt and uncle, Derek Trafford-Owen,  have been happily married now for fifty-one years. I remember their wedding well. At the reception my older brother and I played under the tables and I remember us crawling through seas of cigarette stubs. Derek has just published a book, A Family History, which is a wonderful compilation of his memories and experiences. Of Welsh and Irish descent, Derek was brought up in Manchester and lived through the war there before being called up do his national service in Malaya. Afterwards, he qualified as a barrister, came to London and became a civil servant. He rose to become a senior law officer in the Department of the Environment, where he helped draft early environmental legislation. He finished his career with English Heritage and has since travelled widely. That is a very dry summary of the book, compiled with the help of his wife, Jo, and daughter, Katherine. In fact, it is full of the most wonderful anecdotes and observations, always recounted with his characteristic dry wit. The way in which he has set out his recollections and his research about his ancestors is also exemplary. Too late my brothers and I realised that we had few records of our parents’ early lives. We made up for it with long chats towards the end but now we have ageing photograph albums full of pictures of people they knew but we will probably never be able to identify…

My sole surviving maternal aunt organised a big family reunion at her North London house this afternoon. Like the Westlakes, the Harrisons (my mother’s side of the family) have a globe-trotting tendency, with branches of the family now established in Australia, South Africa and the West Coast of America as well as Belgium and the Czech Republic and all points of the compass in the UK, and everybody seems to be travelling frequently anyway. Such gatherings are thus rare. Not everybody could make it, of course, but the Harrisons were nevertheless there in considerable numbers and there was much swapping of news over my aunt’s delicious Christmas fare. The star of the show was undoubtedly the chap in the picture. Not a single tear or moan all afternoon and plenty of big smiles. If only his father could support a serious football team! But already the next generation was on its way. My aunt has always lived in the same house and it was sobering to remember that I used to babysit and entertain young cousins there who now have growing families themselves…