I got the red-eye Eurostar to London this morning for a family gathering. London is my home town and I know parts of it like the back of my hand. It was cold and misty – Dickensian weather – and with hours to kill I set off happily on a wander through Bloomsbury and Holborn, where many Westlake ghosts lurk. The Lamb in Lamb’s Conduit Street; the favourite watering hole of one of my great grandfathers. The Cittie of Yorke on High Holborn, where my paternal grandmother would warm her toes at the open fire. Brookes Court, and the space where my late father’s childhood tenement house had stood (destroyed by a landmine). St Alban’s next door, where he went to church.  (I am often struck by the intimate proximity of Gray’s Inn, a bastion of great privilege and literally next door to what were, at the time, some of London’s poorest neighbourhoods). Southampton Row and the old tram tunnels (now used as car parks). My father remembered the thrill as a small boy of descending into the dark. And I also walked past Great Ormond Street hospital for sick children and entered the courtyard where the main entrance used to be (picture). I could still walk from Euston station to that spot with my eyes closed. Here, in 1971, during six of the worst months of my life, my younger brother lay in a coma and died. Since his three brothers all went to university and did well in their lives I often wonder what might have been. I could still point out what room he was in (fourth floor, fourth window from the right). Later, I walked down to the Strand, up through Convent Garden, and out into Charing Cross Road, where I trawled the second-hand book shops just as I had done for so many hours as a teenager. I just had time left to go the National Portrait Gallery, one of London’s many jewels. There are all sorts of wonders here, but one of my favourites is Sam Walsh’s 1964 ‘Mike’s brother’. The Mike in question was Mike McCartney, and the brother in question was Paul. Afterwards, I nipped out through Charing Cross Station to the Thames (you can’t come to London and not see the Thames), and then it was out on the Northern Line to Highgate. What a city!

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the United Kingdom’s accession to the European Union. I realise that this means that for fifteen years of my life I was not a citizen of the European Union. What do I remember of my pre-accession life? New Zealand lamb, butter, cheddar and apples. Australian merino wool. The first plastic Hong Kong toys. Er… not much more, frankly. I of course remember pounds, shillings and pence and the torture of twelve times tables, but decimilisation had already happened in 1971 (I was strongly reminded of the mechanics of the process, and the debates about shopkeepers’ allegedly inflationary pricing tactics, when euro notes and coins were introduced). By the time I was taking an interest in politics, Harold Wilson had promised a referendum (1974) and ‘Sunny Jim’ Callaghan was renegotiating the terms of entry. When I first came to Brussels in the early 1980s (less than a decade after accession, I realise) there were still a lot of British, Irish and Danish people around who had been in the negotiating teams or among the first officials of their nationalities to work in the institutions. I met a lot of them on the squash courts and I always listened attentively to their reminiscences. Perhaps the most poignant concerned their lost Norwegian friends, for on 22 January 1972 four countries signed accession treaties to the then European Communities: Denmark, Ireland, Norway and the United Kingdom. On 23 April 1972 France held a referendum on whether those four countries should be allowed in. (Often forgotten, the referendum result was 68.3% in favour.) On 10 May 1972 the Irish people voted in a referendum by 83% in favour of accession. So certain did the accession process seem that on 12 September 1972 the ministers of finance of the six founding member states met together with their counterparts from the four acceding countries and agreed to set up a European Monetary Cooperation Fund as a first step towards economic and monetary union. Then, on 25 September, the Norwegian people voted in a referendum and rejected membership by 53.5%. On 2 October the Danish people held their referendum and opted by 63.3% in favour of accession. On 7 October the Norwegian government announced that it would not be taking the ratification of the accession bill before parliament. On 16 October the United Kingdom parliament ratified the accession act. Those grizzled veterans on the squash courts recounted vividly the disbelief and consternation of their Norwegian friends as they drowned their sorrows in the Victoria Pub on the Rond Point Schuman (long since disappeared) where they had so recently celebrated the successful closing of the accession negotiations. There are probably quite a few lessons in all of that. But let me close by simply pointing out that today may mark the 40th anniversary of the UK’s accession, but it also marks the 40th anniversary of Norway’s absence.

Like ‘well being’, ‘mindfulness‘ is an increasingly ubiquitous term (and concept) that has become prevalent on the management coaching circuit. Borrowed from Eastern texts and Buddhist philosophy, ‘mindfulness is beyond all thinking, wishful and otherwise, …the here and now is the stage on which this work unfolds continuously.’ At least, that is how Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn summarises it in Wherever You Go, There You Are – Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life (first published in 1994), which I have just finished. An enthusiastic Facebook tipper and the book’s longevity on the shelves piqued my curiosity. Perhaps one of the reasons for its continued popularity is that it is not one of those thin articles waiting to get out of a fat book but, rather, a collection of reflective essays encouraging meditativeness. There are some longeurs, lorryloads of metaphors (inter alia mountains, lakes and fire), selected recycling of Zen Buddhist approaches, analyses of associated concepts such as karma and ahimsa, and plentiful quotations from the Dalai Lama, Einstein, Gandhi, Hesse (Siddhartha), Jung, Lao-Tzu and… I think you have got the picture. For me, perhaps because I have been reading around such concepts for a while, the book improved towards the end. There are useful discussions about being grounded and an interesting distinction between mindfulness and spirituality and, a key statement for anybody motivated by competitiveness or ambition: ‘meditation really is the one human activity in which you are not trying to get anywhere else but simply allowing yourself to be where and as you already are’ (hence the book’s title). Kabat-Zinn is a professor of medecine and the founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts. For anybody in a stressful environment, this book is good on why giving yourself some space to think is not selfish but essential.

Daughter Christmas gave me another wonderfully evocative book of a very different sort. In 2005, whilst touring a solo show, Laurie Anderson started to have particularly vivid dreams (of foxes pleading with corpses, for example, and of eating penguin in Brighton). She began to draw her dreams on a tablet ‘literally,’ as she put it, ‘out of self defence.’ Later, she put very brief texts with the pictures and the book is a collection of those drawings and the accompanying texts. Through Nightlife I became aware of another of Laurie Anderson’s skills – for the drawings and sketches are very accomplished. There is something innocently voyeuristic about Anderson’s exploration of her mind’s night life (nothing in the least risqué but consistently surreal). At the end of the book she briefly explores theories about why we have dreams at all, speculating that ‘Maybe dreams are the secret language of the body. The body which has been silent all day talks to us all night in its private language of images, puns, gossip, memories, dire predictions, fables and stories… The body talking to the mind?’ My favourite among her dreams (and her illustrations) is the following: ‘Four women on a couch are floating down a river in the fog/I’m not sure whether they’re people I know or people from paintings./I really wish I could go with them but there’s no room on the couch./I shout but they don’t seem to hear me.’

Mrs Christmas gave me a beautifully presented and sadly evocative book; Paola De Pietri’s To Face. In August 1980, whilst teaching English to a young Italian student at Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites, I first came across some of the vestiges of one of the most extraordinary theatres of the First World War. This particular part of that attrocious conflict, evocatively analysed and described in Mark Thompson’s The White War; Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1918, took place at altitude and in the winter. Where the fashionable now ski, men once fought, starved, froze and died. In 1980, somewhere near the Ra Valles Refuge (at 2,500 metres altitude) we could see spread out on a rocky mountain slope the remains of a military encampment, including broken wagon wheels and barrels and mountains of rusting tin cans. How could men live, let alone fight, in such conditions? De Pietri did not get up to Ra Valles, but she did go up into the Alps, the Pre-Alps and the Carso (the equivalent in significance to the Italians of the Somme to the British or Verdun to the French), in winter and in summer, and she photographed what she saw. In her own words; ‘I explored the places that witnessed history, searching for the thin thread of memory, the final defence of a past … before it enters oblivion.  …the landscapes which appear to be natural are in fact the result of the battles fought and the daily lives lived, for years, by hundreds of thousands of soldiers.’ Her photographs ‘…trace the gradual disintegration of the signs left by the events of war and their reabsorption into the natural environment..’ De Pietri’s beautiful book is a monument to man’s folly and his fortitude and the inevitability of obliteration.

This evening we watched a 2009 British science fiction drama, Moon, directed by Duncan Jones. The director, who went on to make the intriguing Source Code, was once known primarily for being David Bowie’s son but now, with two excellent films under his belt, surely deserves to be recognised in his own right. Moon is a clever film in several respects. It was clearly made on a relative shoe string and the script written to reduce the number of actors to a minimum. It is also in part a sort of hommage to such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris. Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell), working alone on a lunar mining base with only a computer (GERTY, voiced by Kevin Spacey) for company, is coming to the end of his three year tour of duty. He starts to hallucinate and crashes his rover. He awakes back in the base and overhears the computer being given instructions not to let him out of the base. The suspicious Bell finds a way out and drives out to the wreck of the rover. Inside is the injured Bell. If I write any more I’ll give the game away. Like The Prestige, Moon manipulates its audience into making an erroneous assumption and then gradually reveals the error. In its treatment of concepts such as mortality and man’s future need for dispensable intelligent labour, it also rather reminded me of a short story, Garden of Eden.

In 2001, I was working in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education and Culture, my part of which was housed in the rue Belliard (n° 7). One day our offices, which were at the top of the building, started to wobble alarmingly. We feared an earth tremor, but nobody else in the neighbourhood had felt anything. The tremors and the wobbling continued to such an extent that my Director-General, Klaus van der Pas, authorised me to evacuate the building if I felt it necessary. In the end, we discovered that the tremors were caused by the demolition of a 1950s building on the corner of rue Montoyer and rue du Commerce. When they could get away with it, the demolishers were allowing huge blocks of concrete to fall to the the ground. Sadly, today I learned that those blocks were revolutionary prefabricated concrete facade elements developed by Belgian engineer Robert Degroodt to the design of architect André Jacquemain and his close associate Jules Wabbes and that the building in question was the Foncolin (Fonds Colonial des Invalidités). Arguably, Wabbes was to Jacquemain and the Foncolin what Philip Johnson was to Mies van der Rohe and his Seagram Building: everything – down to furniture and doorknobs – was an integral part of the overall design. The sorry tale as to how such desecration could be authorised – and with the complicity of the original architect – is summarised here. If you can, get to the Bozar before 13 January and visit the retrospective exhibition of the work of Belgian furniture designer Jules Wabbes. Wabbes died young (54) and never became particularly well known, but the influence he had on his contemporaries is immediately apparent from the works on display in this exhibition. It’s well worth a visit.

To the Bozar to visit the Constant Permeke retrospective organised to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the great Flemish expressionist’s death. We last saw a Permeke restrospective back in the 1990s, in Ostend, and I remembered cheerfully colourful early work succeeded by high horizons, hard-to-light sombre and scabrous canvasses and monumental nudes in blacks and browns. This excellently curated and presented exhibition corrected some of my assumptions and confirmed others. Permeke is quoted as saying ‘I paint not what I see but what I believe I have seen.’ In fact, Permeke increasingly painted monumental archetypes; his farmers, for example, have hands and feet bigger than their heads, for what mattered more was hard physical toil (no room for thought!). His women, whether pregnant or in domestic pose or labouring in the fields or in the throes of grief, are massive because the women of the farming and fishing communities he fell in love with were true moral and physical giants, carrying the world and all of its hardships on their shoulders. (His depictions are also reminders of the abject, bare-foot poverty of such a recent past.) Where my memory had failed me was in the colours Permeke used, by no means limited to the blacks and browns I had remembered. In particular, he painted huge, bright landscapes of the farmland around him at Jabbeke in vivid greens and yellows, splayed the red roofs of the village across one canvas, and limned his nudes, when they were not in fiery reds or translucent whites, with shades of green. Touchingly, the exhibition begins and ends with his beloved wife, Maria Delaere. We see the young Marietje from behind in 1907, a shawl draped around her narrow shoulders and hinting at a svelte waist. And then, at the end, we see her on her 1948 deathbed (picture). We have seen her in between, bearing child, providing food and, in Permeke’s representations of Niobe, in howling grief (they lost two of their six children). She did not have long to await him (he died in 1952). What this retrospective does particularly well is to give us a sense, through his work, of the man behind the artist. In the end they were indissociable, the one from the other.

We’ve been working our way through the first series of The West Wing again. I have only seen the White House from the outside and, according to insiders, a lot of geographical liberties were taken within the ultimately claustrophobic space where most of the action takes place. The series was criticised also for the schmaltzy depiction of such key characters as the President himself (played very well by Martin Sheen) and his chief of staff. But, schmaltz or not, the series is good on at least some of the fundamentals. In the first place, there is the frenetic activity of the staff (revolving through all those ‘walk-and-talks’, with clever camera work, around the relative calm of the main man) and all of the jealousies and suspicions and rivalries that can be generated by working cheek-by-jowl 24/7 with a gang of very clever and committed high achievers who all know they have precious little time to make a small mark on history before planning their ‘next future’. A President’s four year mandate might be characterised by revolution, then consolidation, then legacy, but the stark truth is that a President can be well into the second year of his term before his administration is fully in place, and the pre-election frenzy starts once again already eighteen months out (for those aiming for a second term, but also for those who are not). Assuming the majorities are there on Capitol Hill (not an automatic assumption any more), even a relatively unambitious President has precious little time to just be President. In the second place, the series is good on the constant firefighting. Something is forever cropping up and it and its consequences have to be contained. In his memoirs, Tony Blair writes evocatively about the frustrating realisation that leaders and their administrations spend most of their time on relatively unimportant matters and subsequently too little of their time on the truly important issues. Clearly, the scriptwriters did a lot of research and the depth to that was illustrated to me by one small moment when the President’s Chief-of-Staff (John Spencer’s excellent Leo McGarry) urges him to leave an issue to his successor (the political equivalent of sweeping rubble under the carpet). Sheen’s Josiah Bartlet dismisses such a possibility for he is already a future member of the trades union of former presidents – that very small club of people who have actually done the job and wrestled with the moral dilemmas only they have to deal with and therefore can fully understand.

This evening, thanks to St Dominic’s International Priory, we celebrated Christmas in seven different languages, including Burundi Kirundi. It has been a heavy and testing year in many different ways, but Christmas always creates the impression that, for a few hours at least, we can relax and rejoice together (think of that famous football match in the Flanders’ trenches). I, for one, intend to hang up my pen/keyboard for a few days and get some rest and fresh air. I wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy, Healthy, Peaceful and Prosperous New Year.