Yesterday afternoon and evening it snowed in Brussels. It was funny to see the excitement this caused, as reflected in many Facebook entries. Clearly, snow in Brussels has become a rare occurence. When I got back home from the office in the evening, I had a snowball fight in the garden with my wife and son (my daughter wisely stayed indoors). The snow was of a perfect consistency for making snowballs that held together during their trajectories and shattered satisfyingly on impact. Great fun! Inevitably, the experience triggered childhood memories and, tracing these back, I realised that snowball fights had become rarer and rarer as snow became an increasingly rare phenomenon in London. When I first came to Belgium, in 1980, there were cross-country ski stations dotted throughout the Ardennes. Now, you have to look very hard to find such a place. As weather patterns come and go, so do industries.

I took my daughter and a friend to see a local amateur production of Fiddler on the Roof. The company, the British Light Opera Company (or ‘BLOC’, as they call themselves) are regular providers of excellent fare (they last put on a wonderful Mikado) and we were not disappointed on this occasion. In particular, Tony Lowe gave a wonderful performance as Tevye. The songs and the scenes stay in the memory, and though the plot is mostly light-hearted the underlying theme – persecution of the Jews in Tsarist Russia – is horribly serious. As I left I suddenly remembered a family holiday in the southern Czech Republic, in Bohemia, somewhere in the mid-1990s. We came across an abandoned Jewish cemetery in the middle of nowhere. Such haunting places are dotted all over central and eastern Europe (where they haven’t disappeared altogether). This one, with its shattered stones among giant trees, was sadly beautiful. Looking at the stones, I noticed that the name Löwy was repeated frequently. We had a friend, half-Danish, half-English, with the surname Lowy. Thinking it a coincidence, I took photographs of the gravestones to show her when next we were in London. She looked through them, getting sadder and sadder. ‘That was my grandparents’ village,’ she said. ‘They were all chased out.’ Until that moment, I had not known of my friend’s Jewish ancestry, but suddenly I understood the immense pain shared throughout the diaspora.

Vertbois

This morning began with another rite of passage for the EESC – greeting the newcomers. The Committee organises a two-day seminar for all of its new officials and the Secretary General is expected to greet them and give an overall presentation of the Committee. I always enjoy such first encounters and, of course, as the Union enlarges, so the number of nationalities in the room naturally increases. Beethoven’s Ninth is the EU’s informal anthem but, as my kids know, I think the modern European anthem should be Kraftwerk‘s ‘Europe Endless’ from the album Trans-Europe Express. Its deceptively simple lyrics – ‘Europe, endless’ – come back to me on such occasions.

Later, I set off for Liège, to the Walloon Economic and Social Council where, at the kind invitation of its Secretary General, Jean-Pierre Dawance, I delivered a lunchtime talk about the European Economic and Social Comittee. This was preceded by a guided tour of the Council’s Headquarters, a historic building known as Vertbois, a former foundlings’ home and hospital. My guide was Pierre Gilissen, who is permanent secretary of the Walloon Region’s Royal Commission for Monuments, Sites and Excavations. The building’s history is fascinating and the guided tour was a privilege and a pleasure. The Wallon Council is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary (the EESC is this year celebrating its 50th!) and it was good to meet with the Council’s members, its administration and members of the public who had come for the talk. Clearly, the consultative function and advisory role can be played at all levels, from the local to the European.

One of our members, Yves Somville, is living proof of this, since he is a member both of the EESC and of the Wallon Economic and Social Council!

Yesterday was filled with just two long meetings. Today, on the other hand, was a much more varied affair. In the morning we had a short coordination meeting with our President, Mario Sepi, who wishes to use the time created by next year’s electoral hiatus (the European Parliament elections will take place in June) in order to galavanise the Committee into adopting a set of own-initiative opinions that will set out the EESC’s vision of future priorities and questions from the point of view of organised civil society. It is an excellent idea and will, I am sure, generate much interest. Later, I had lunch with a Romanian Committee member, Marius Opran. He is one of our more active members and a great expert on the aeronautics and defence industries. During the day I also met with an Italian Professor, Umberto Triulzi, from the Sapienza University (Rome) and Ana Aguardo, the Brussels-based representative of the European University Institute , and later was interviewed by a journalist for the European Parliament’s newsletter. But the icing on the cake came in the early evening, when the President and I hosted a reception for all new officials and those retiring. It is a tradition in the Committee for the Secretary General to say a few words about each retiring official before the President hands them a commemorative platter and a certificate. I always find it an immensely touching moment. Some of our retiring officials had worked for 37 years. I imagine myself in their place and realise both what a massive commitment this represents and the huge step they are taking.

Most of today was taken up with two coordination meetings, one at administrative and one at political level. The administrative meeting was the usual Monday morning Directors’ meeting. The afternoon meeting, though, was a less routine affair. The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions share several services, including translation and logistics. The simple logic is to realise economies of scale. A framework cooperation agreement sets out the rules of the game. A coordination committee meets regularly at high administrative level, but the general working of the agreement is overseen at political level by a political monitoring group (PMG) composed of members of both Committees. It was this political monitoring group that met this afternoon. I believe that the cooperation agreement between the two Committees is a revolutionary and pioneering arrangement. It is not always easy to manage, but it does work and, on the whole, work well. Proof of this came with this afternoon’s PMG meeting, which went smoothly and ended with a round of applause.

Jeremy Duns

A former member of my writers’ circle, Jeremy Duns, recently landed a three-book deal with Simon and Schuster (Viking in the US), and another current member, Leila Rasheed, is about to be commissioned to write two more books (in addition to the three already either published or commissioned). Well, we’re all published authors (that’s one of the conditions for belonging to the circle). Nevertheless, when we hear such good news (which we always celebrate) we collectively joke that it is only a matter of time for the rest of us. In my case, I’m afraid that means rather a lot of time. Choosing to write a saga whilst holding down a big job was, possibly, slightly unwise. Oh well. It will keep me young, as they say. By the way, you can read extracts and the first chapter of Dun’s Free Agent on his website (link above).

Jimi

Yesterday morning I listened to The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first album, Are you experienced? As a sort of homage to Mitch Mitchell, the Experience’s drummer, who died on Thursday (13 November). I was too young to see Hendrix live, alas, but I certainly saw the film, back in 1973. He was a prodigy; certainly as revolutionary as Paganini in his day. Anecdote has it that, having seen Hendrix’s extraordinary talent, the great Eric Clapton thought about giving up. All this leads me on to a spurious rhetorical question: is air guitar to modern music the equivalent of pretending to conduct a non-existent orchestra to classical music?

Kolja Blacher

Yesterday evening we went to the Palais des Beaux Arts to feast on Stravinsky. The London Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of a handsome young Russian, Vladimir Jurowski, played a scherzo and the Rite of Spring with extraordinary panache. Everything was brilliant (Jurowski is delightful), but the highlight of the evening was surely Stravinsky’s violin concerto. The violinist, Kolja Blacher, was brilliant. He played on the ‘Triton’, a Stradivarius violin made in 1730. How many instruments, I wonder, would still be played at performance level almost three hundred years after they were made?

The privilege reminded me of a visit to Genoa with a parliamentary committee many moons ago. The new (Carlo Felice) opera house had just been finished and, as a special treat, we were invited in. I forget the name (apologies, whoever you were) but the then ‘curator violinist’ treated us to Paganini’s caprices but – and this was the extraordinary thing – played on Paganini’s violin, the so-called Cannone of Giuseppe Guarnerius del Gesu, the violin that Paganini had used all of his life.

Music is like a magical sweet shop, everything is free, you can eat as much as you like, free of charge, and there are only positive consequences.

The current world champions, South Africa, are living dangerously at the moment. Both Wales last Saturday and Scotland today should have beaten them and are rueing their missed chances. But both matches were excellent entertainment. Meanwhile, did I see Liverpool at the head of the Premier League for a few giddy hours this afternoon?

Last night we had a nephew and a niece, together with her boyfriend, to dinner. We are immensely fond of them. The nephew is just back from Brazil and about to head off to Algeria. He, half-Belgian, half-French, explained his motives in opting for a challenging location rather than a cushier and more financially rewarding posting in the United Arab Emirates (where he’d had a firm offer). It was precisely the challenge, together with a desire to feel that he was doing good (he will be managing a project to build a desalination plant), that had guided him. We old fogies have been led to believe that today’s more individualistic younger generations are inherently selfish but here was an excellent counter-example.

The niece and her boyfriend have just got back from a truly extraordinary nine month, 9,000 kilometres cycling trip from Buenos Aires down to Patagonia, and then back up through Chile in a big loop leading ultimately back down to Buenos Aires again. They showed us some of their pictures and talked about their experiences: the warm hospitality, the extraordinary wild life, leaping tarantulas, soaring condors, puma paw prints outside their tent in the morning, a surreal encounter with the Belgian rugby team in the back of beyond, the challenge of pedalling through snow in 4,000 metre-high mountain passes and across endless salt flats. They also took time out to scale some mountains, including a live volcano. These were places and sites that we have never heard of but that in Europe would surely be major tourist destinations and the subjects of millions of postcards. But what came across most was the almost spiritual experience they had both had in cycling through the vast emptiness of the southern tip of Latin America; indeed, the niece had to hold back her tears when she talked about it. It made me think of the mystic experiences of hermits and saints in the mythical wilderness. The question arises, though, what next? The niece is a brilliant lawyer specialised in human rights law. She has also passed an open competition to work for the European Commission. In other words, she could walk into any job she wanted and I have no doubt that, like her cousin, she will do great and good things. But both she and her boyfriend are having problems in acclimatising themselves to the idea of mere work in the modern western world. What do you do next when you have had such a profound experience?

The question reminded me of a colleague working in one of the EESC’s Groups. Like Murakami (see 31 October post) he is a marathon runner. Recently he ran a 100 kilometres race, running through the night, stopping only for water and snacks. It may not have been quite such a spiritual experience (or, at least, not in the same way), but it was nevertheless an extraordinary feat of intensive effort, endurance and a great personal achievement. Again, as he put it, ‘What do you do after you’ve done that?’