On the way back from Habay we picked up the boyfriend at Marbehan station and then got happily lost in the beautiful countryside, certain that we would pick up a road to Brussels sooner or later. So it was that we came to Rossignol and to two immensely touching French First World War cemeteries tucked away in the middle of the forest, Orée de la Forët and Plateau. The former is the last resting place of no less than 2,388 unknown soldiers. The latter is beautified by the trees that grow among the graves (picture). This is true La Vie et Rien d’Autre territory: several of the tombs bear the legend ’empty’ – presumably after their remains were exhumed and repatriated. The men in these cemeteries – together with many more German and French soldiers whose remains have since been repatriated or gathered elsewhere – died in a single day, 22 August 1914, in fighting around Rossignol. Today, the forest is idyllically, serenely beautiful, rendering the silent presence of so many war dead poignantly incongruous.

Up early this morning and down to Habay-La-Neuve, to the Chateau du Pont D’Oye, the ancestral home of the Nothomb family. I was last in Habay on the sad occasion of the funeral of one of my predecessors, Simon-Pierre Nothomb. Today was a much happier occasion. My better half is a descendant of the Belgian poet, academic and lawyer, Thomas Braun. Once in a blue moon, all of the Braun descendants find a reason for a grand get together. Today’s excuse, bringing together over two hundred people, was the 75th anniversary of the benediction of the forest of Anlier, a ceremony created by Thomas Braun and his friends, Pierre Nothomb and Adrien de Prémorel. (In fact, the Braun-Nothomb connection goes back much further. Braun’s grandfather, also a Thomas, was a German educationalist who was invited to the very young Belgium to help create its educational system by the then Belgian Prime Minister, Jean-Baptiste Nothomb.) The open-air gathering was greeted with jubilantly good weather and there was much speechifying, including, of course, by Simon-Pierre’s distinguished brother, Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb, before we got down to the serious business of lunch. One of the poet’s grand daughters had assembled a fascinating exhibition of documents and photographs of the Braun family and its members, many of whom my better half had met and was moved to rediscover through those fading black-and-white and sepia images. And two hunting bands (one in the picture) amused us with their noisy rivalry. Quite simply, a lovely day. (Update: a television channel broadcast this report on the event.)

I finished reading Paul Auster’s latest offering, Winter Journal, today. This is not a Blue Jay Way, I’m afraid, but something far worse. Why, oh why, did he think that this was suitable for publication? And why, oh why did Faber and Faber (Faber and Faber!) agree to publish it? The basic conceit is that Auster, at the age of 64, has entered the winter of his life (why at 64?). The reader is treated to a mostly wistful (and at times self-pitying) memoir written in the second person, implying that, since it was addressed to himself, it was somehow never intended for publication and that we are therefore getting a voyeuristic glimpse of something intimate. There are some flashes of characteristic observation, his portrait of his mother is touching and at times he is searingly, self-lasceratingly honest. But these occasional reminders of what used to be were not enough (for me, at least) to offset an almost unremittingly narcissistic account, fractured into fragments of recollection of varying lengths meant, I suspect, to imitate a musical fugue or dance (or both). The dominant theme throughout is Auster’s body and its decline. Too many of those fragments are lists of one sort or another – some of them very long (I mean pages long) – and too many seem like crudely recycled excerpts from Auster’s diary. Too often the writing is clumsy. Critical reviewers write of Auster’s self-mythologisation and cite a revealing passage where, apparently without any self-consciousness or intended irony, he likens his writing hand to that of Keats’s. Auster also recalls a funny anecdote about James Joyce and his hand. But, tellingly, instead of leaving the reader to enjoy the lewd implications of Joyce’s remark (‘No details given, but what a delicious piece of smut and innuendo, all the more effective because he left everything to the woman’s imagination,’ Auster redundantly tells us), he spells them all out (‘What did he want her to see?’ and then the reader gets yet another list). To be fair, there are some positive reviews out there (here, for example), but most are critical (see here and here). Perhaps the kindest way to look at it is that whatever Auster was trying to do, it didn’t work. But, then, when Auster was at the peaks of his powers nobody needed to be kind.

I took the night flight to Larnaca yesterday evening in order to attend an extraordinary meeting today of the EESC’s workers’ group at Nicosia on the theme of ‘A European budget for employment’. The meeting took place at the headquarters of the Cyprus Workers’ Confederation (SEK). The conference was addressed by, among others,  the Deputy Minister for European Affairs, Andreas Mavroyiannis, the Minister of Labour and Social Insurance, Sotiroula Charalambous, and the General Secretaries of the three main Cyprus trades union federations. After presentations by the three General Secretaries, the first part of the meeting concentrated on the economic and social situation in Cyprus. This was followed by a presentation of the Cyprus Presidency’s programme. The afternoon sessions concentrated on strategies to relaunch the local and national economy, particularly with regard to the strategic use of the European budget. Quite apart from the divided nature of the island, its small population, geographic distance (it is just 100 kilometres from Syria and Lebanon, whereas mainland Greece is 800 kilometres away) and special history, Cyprus is characterised by a number of specificities, including a high quality primary and secondary school system, accompanied by a high level of mobility of its young population for university studies (who necessarily have to go abroad). In a few observations, the sense of the day’s proceedings was: the chain of crises was initially triggered by an exogenous crisis (American) and in the reforms currently underway measures should be taken to ensure that the European economic and banking system cannot be affected similarly by such exogenous factors in the future; the obvious response to the current crisis is a coordinated European one, which means that all instruments at the Union’s and the member states’ disposal should be used together in a holistic fashion; Europe’s social model should not allow itself to be portrayed as being somehow part of the problem but, rather, a key to a successful relaunch, capitalising on intellectual capital and a highly-skilled work force; strategies for employment-rich growth are vital. In this context the conference heard from three EESC rapporteurs: Carmelo Cedrone (Growth and sovereign debt in the EU: two innovative proposals); Gérard Dantin (Smart fiscal policy consolidation strategies); Stefano Palmieri (Financial transaction tax). The Deputy Minister, present at the Committee’s ‘Step Up’ conference in Brussels just three days previously, clearly appreciates his interactions with the Committee and values the Presidency’s dialogue with it. This was a long trip for a short conference but, as the Workers’ Group’s President, Georges Dassis, pointed out at the beginning of the proceedings, it gave all of the non-Cypriot participants an insight into the experiences of the EESC’s Cypriot members every time that they participate in Committee proceedings. Even with direct flights, when those are on time, a Cypriot member would need to spend a day-and-a-half on travel even for a half day meeting, involving a return flight arriving at one in the morning of a third day. (In my specific case, the flight was delayed by almost an hour, so that we arrived at almost two a.m.. By the time we had travelled to our hotels it was three a.m.) This brings me on to another observation. Nicosia’s international airport has been closed since the Turkish invasion in 1974. Larnaca has become, by default, Cyprus’s main international airport. But, although connected by a good motorway to the capital, Larnaca is nevertheless about one hundred kilometres away from the capital. Whilst the Committee’s Cypriot members are not alone in facing travel challenges, it was good for us all to witness first hand the specific travel challenges facing them. Those Cypriot organisations nominating members to represent them must be very understanding of the amount of absence this will involve. (In the picture: Georges Dassis, President of the Workers’ Group, and Luca Jahier, President of the Various Interests Group.)

All day today President Staffan Nilsson and the European Economic and Social Committee hosted a high-level conference on the basic theme of the Europe 2020 Strategy. The European Council of June 2012 took action to invest more in growth and to supplement the fiscal compact with a growth pact. The European Economic and Social Committee welcomed these measures but, as Staffan explained, feels that the time has come to put the “Compact for growth and jobs”, adopted as part of the Europe 2020 Strategy, into real practice. How can this be achieved? What are the best levers and tools? Which areas are the best triggers for sustainable growth and social cohesion? This VIP-studded (no exaggeration) conference provided the opportunity for a rich, far-ranging and constructive debate on strategic levers, such as economic governance, the budget, the Single Market, employment, innovation and sustainability. The conference, which was a great success, showcased and shared the specific expertise and grassroots ideas of those who make growth and jobs a reality: namely, social and economic players represented in the EESC and in economic and social councils across Europe and many other civil society actors at local, national, regional and European level. I cannot possibly do justice to the conference contents in one post (there is extensive coverage on the Committee’s website here), but I shall just finish with Staffan Nilsson’s closing words: ‘The best way to predict the future is to create it.’

This evening we ticked off another of the films on our coast-to-coast list, Martin Scorsese’s 2002 Gangs of New York. This story of gang warfare in New York City’s notorious Five Points district is based on plenty of historical truth, with nativists (those born in New York) fighting to prevent waves of Irish immigrants from establishing supremacy whilst increasing amounts of humanity were being squeezed into the slum. The powder keg eventually exploded over the draft (for the civil war), leading Lincoln to send several regiments to the city to control what had essentially become full-blown race riots (complete with lynch mobs). Daniel Day-Lewis, playing the leader of the nativists, Bill ‘The Butcher’ Cutting, is undoubtedly the star of the show. He also gets all the best lines. ‘When you kill a king you kill him where the whole court can watch him die.’ ‘The appearance of the law must be upheld, especially whilst it’s being broken.’ And ‘The first rule of politics: the ballots don’t make the results, it’s the counters.’ (Are you listening, Al Gore?) At the very end of the film we watch over Cutting’s supposed Brooklyn Heights grave as the modern city of New York steadily grows where once the slums had been. None of it mattered, the film is telling us, and yet it mattered a lot to its protagonists.

Thanks to a friend’s tip (thanks, Andreas), I have been reading a fascinating 2002 study by Christian Morel entitled Les décisions absurdes:  sociologie des erreurs radicales et persistantes. The book begins with a number of examples of absurd decisions, involving for example avoidable plane and ship crashes. Whilst travelling up the west coast of the US this summer we came across a perfect historical example of an absurd decision: the 1923 Honda Point disaster (picture), the largest peacetime loss of US Navy ships, in which nine destroyers raced at full speed in fog onto Honda Point, with a loss of 23 lives. An early radio navigation system had warned of the danger but had not been trusted. Morel’s learned treatise develops a typology and a sociology of such decisions. They tend to involve a collective (Morel writes about the collective rationality of absurd decisions), over-confidence in people’s judgements and a tendency to believe one’s own sight- or sensation-based perceptions rather than an external authority. Morel’s analysis reminds me of Russell Ackoff’s observation that ‘Most large social systems are pursuing objectives other than the ones they proclaim, and the ones they pursue are wrong. They try to do the wrong thing righter, and this makes what they do wronger. It is much better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right, because when errors are corrected, it makes doing the wrong thing wronger but the right thing righter.’ In any case, we should all be aware that absurd decisions occur more frequently than we would like to believe and hence be wary about the nonchalant certitude of authority.

It has been a long, hard and sad week. This evening I fancied something ‘cheerful’ so we watched Robert Zemeckis’s 1994  Forrest Gump, one of a number of films that we have decided to watch after our trip to the States. In this case, the link is that we recently stood in the exact same place on the highway in Monument Valley where Gump finally decides that he has run enough and turns and runs back home, back to reality (picture). For a while the film was adopted by American conservatives, who saw it as an elegy for simple American values. But it was always more complex than that. Tom Hanks plays Gump brilliantly – a fool just clever enough to realise that he is stupid, and with none of the slyness of a Svejk. As Zemeckis put it, Gump ‘has no agenda and no opinion about anything except Jenny, his mother and God.’ The film is probably best seen as a fable, with the vacancy of Gump’s decent fool acting as a foil to the epic slice of history through which he lives. In any case, whatever the merits or demerits of the film, Hanks’s performance is up there with Hoffman in Rainman, Sellars in Being There and DiCaprio in Gilbert Grape.

Time this morning for an early walk with the dog out at Berthem and a breath of fresh air. The potato fields are ready for harvesting (picture) and I am sure that by the time I get out that way again they’ll all have gone. I have written before about the way this landscape is constantly changing, as season follows season and harvest follows crop follows seeding follows ploughing. When I am out walking like this, before going into the office, I understand well why, when he could, Jean Monnet would take a long walk every day in the countryside before getting down to work.

When I was eighteen I had a girlfriend who was studying at University College, London. She lived in a hall of residence in deepest Bloomsbury and we spent a lot of time walking around the area, frequently ending our evenings in a pub. The Lamb in Conduit Street, just around the back of Great Ormond Street hospital (where my brother had died eight years before – but that’s another story) was one of these. Although the pub’s sign was, predictably, a lamb, it was in fact named after a William Lamb who in 1577 improved upon an existing conduit to bring clean water down from Holborn as an act of charity to benefit the neighbourhood. The pub itself was built in the mid-eighteenth century and one of its distinctive features was that it still had all its frosted glass ‘snob screens’ (it still has some – the ones in front have been taken away now). These were etched glass screens placed above the bar which hid the customer from the publican when he or she ordered drinks. Particularly popular in the 1890s, the screens gave the customer privacy but their hinges allowed the the bar staff to keep an eye on things. At my Uncle Danny’s funeral today I got talking with one of my father’s cousins, David, who had recently been approached by an amateur genealogist. This lady, a distant relative, had been able to shed some light on my paternal great-grandfather, Arthur, about whom we Westlakes knew very little. He moved down to London from Harrogate to seek his fortune and ended up in Holborn. His ‘local’, where he would go of an evening to drink and eat was … the Lamb in Conduit Street.