I had to take my first tough administrative decisions today, but I went out of my way to explain them to the people involved. This also involved going before the EESC’s Communication Group. It was a bitter-sweet occasion because this was the last meeting chaired by Jillian van Turnhout, an Irish member (Various Interests Group) with whom I have worked very closely since 2003, when I first came to the Committee. Jillian somehow manages to combine a high profile job in Ireland (she’s chief executive of the Children’s Rights Alliance) with a highly active career in the Committee. I just don’t know how she does it, but I do know it frequently involves catching the first flight to Brussels and the last flight back to Dublin. The more I think about it, the more I find the commitment of our members (who don’t get a salary and have jobs back home) admirable. The occasion was bitter-sweet because the next Chair of the Communication Group, Irini Pari (Greek, Employers’ Group), is also an excellent communicator and a fully paid-up member of the ‘Plan D’ Club. As to my administrative decisions, they seem to have gone down as well as could be expected.

In the evening to a parents-teachers meeting at my son’s school, one of the European Schools. Schooling just seems so advanced in comparison with my own school days; or was I just not paying attention?

During one of the longeurs, with removals much on my mind, I calculated that, over the course of my twenty-three year career in the EU I have moved office eighteen times, involving nine different buildings (Charlemagne, Berlaymont, Breydel, Nerviens, Trèves, Van Maelant, Belliard, Ravenstein and Jacques Delors). It keeps one young, I suppose.

It’s difficult to avoid clichés, but the day went by in a whirl. Here are some of the highlights.

I should have mentioned before that I came in this morning, as I always have done until now, on my bike. My resolve was sorely tested at seven-thirty when I opened the front door and saw the rain sheeting down, but I am determined to be as ‘green’ as I can be. Curiously, everybody keeps asking me whether I have an official service car and a driver. The answer to both questions is ‘yes’. Doubtless there will be formal occasions when I will use them – but surely not for coming into work and going home.

At nine-thirty I attended the last meeting of Mr Bernardo Hernandez Bataller (a Spanish member of the EESC’s Various Interests Group) as Chairman of the Committee’s Section for the Single Market, Production and Consumption. Dom Bernardo, a lawyer and Secretary General of the Spanish Association of Communication Users, AUC, always courteous and civil, has been a much-respected Section President for four years and the Section members bade him a fond and sad farewell. He isn’t leaving the Committee, though, and I look forward to working with him in his new functions as a member of the Committee’s Budget Group.

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Yesterday afternoon and evening we said goodbye to the European Economic and Social Committee’s Secretary General of the past ten years, Patrick Venturini. Earlier in the day, Patrick had ceremonially handed over to me the keys to a big safe where sensitive documents are kept. We both giggled at the false symbolism of the moment (in reality, the safe is very rarely used). I shall miss those self-deprecating moments when we shared a joke or a comic observation – often at the beginning or the end of a very long day. For the rest, we have been working so closely together for so long that, really, the transition was more like the smooth handing over of a baton in a relay race than a wholesale changing of the guard (I’d like to leave you with the subliminal image of me sprinting away!). As the incoming SG, I delivered a speech to all of the personnel (PDF to download) which was, as I told Patrick, as much from the heart as from the head. He will be a hard act to follow, but he did so very much and he leaves a great legacy.

Now, it is early, 07.30 a.m., on my first day in the new job, and I am determined that every day of my five year mandate will be a positive day in which, together with our members and colleagues, we achieve things together. ‘Don’t you have butterflies in the stomach?’ somebody asked me yesterday evening. The honest answer is that I don’t. I am raring to go and much looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and, in English colloquial parlance, getting ‘stuck in’. I hope you, the reader, will accompany me on this journey. It’s going to be interesting and, I hope, fun.