Maybe it was that echo of Alcatraz in Waterschei, but tonight, as part of our ‘programme’ of post-US trip films, we watched Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz (1979). It’s only a slight exaggeration to write that the film, and Clint Eastwood in it, are as good as The Eiger Sanction, also with Clint Eastwood in it, was bad. It’s a simple story, based broadly on a true one, of the escape of three men from a prison from which it had previously been boasted that prisoners simply couldn’t escape. Eastwood plays according to type: the tough, taciturn loner who knows his own mind, stands up for himself and, in the end, gets what he wants. What gave the film added poignancy for us was, first, that it was filmed on location on Alcatraz itself, and so the action took place in the cell blocks and recreation grounds we had so recently visited and, second, that we had seen for ourselves the air vents that the men had chiselled out with spoons and nail files before slipping through and climbing up a ventilation shaft to the prison roof, and we had seen the dummy heads they had placed in their beds and which fooled the guards, giving the three a precious night to make their getaway. Did they make it through the icy waters and strong currents of the Bay to Angel Island? The film strongly implies that they did. Certainly, their makeshift raft made it to Angel Island, where its remains were discovered. None of the three were murderers, and by portraying the prison governor as a sadist, the film appeals to the romantics in all of us. Morris and the Anglin brothers would be in their eighties now (86, 82 and 81 respectively). Are they out there somewhere and, if so, did they raise their glasses on 11 June this year, the 50th anniversary of their 1962 escape?

In the permanent exhibition at Waterschei there is a mock-up of a Belgian kitchen in the coal age. This reminded me that, as a youngster, I just – just – experienced the end of the coal age. From my bedroom window I watched the London to Glasgow express rattle past every evening, leaving great plumes of smoke hanging in the air, and later the clink, clink, clink of coal wagons being shunted in the local coal yard would lull me to sleep. Steam engines generated coal smoke with a distinctive scent and just one whiff of that smell today transports me back to those sights and sounds. The coal bunker in the back garden (brick coal bunkers and corrugated iron air raid shelters were ubiquitous features of suburban gardens in the fifties and sixties) and the tall, tapered coal scuttle in the front room were both always dirtily full. My brother and I had sword fights with the poker and the shovel that stood ready and waiting beside the fire place. I remember my father’s fire building rituals when guests were coming and a fire was to be lit in the front room (otherwise, we lived in the kitchen in the winter and hot water bottles were de rigeur at bedtime). He used rings of crumpled up newspaper as fire lighters and placed an opened sheet of newspaper over the fireplace to help the fire draw. The coal man with his coal lorry, loaded down with neatly stacked coal sacks in oily hessian, did daily rounds (occasionally we would see a horse-drawn coal cart). He had a sheet of leather over his shoulder and would effortlessly shift sacks onto his shoulder and carry them to his customer’s houses. On rare occasions we would see the sweep, who was a great disappointment because he was not in the slightest bit dirty and wielded his brushes behind a cloth draped over the fireplace in such a way that we never saw even a speck of soot. Once, a chimney caught fire in our street (doubtless because the neighbours had been saving on sweep bills and the accumulated soot in the chimney had caught fire) and a fire engine came, its bell ringing, much to our excitement. Coal smuts – small particles of soft soot that floated on the air – were a menace to our regulation white primary school shirts and the bane of my mother’s life. And I remember a thick fog heavy with coal smoke one evening as we walked with my father to the cinema. He called it a ‘pea souper’. It can’t have been proper smog – that was over by the sixties – but, together with such phenomena as the Kodak factory morning hooter, it gave the young me a sense of living in an industrial, and hence industrious, city. Coal has long since completely disappeared from our lives, and with it a whole culture of coal. But as the serried rows of chimneys and chimney pots on our roof tops still attest, coal was once not so long ago a constant presence in our daily lives.

In the bookshop at Alcatraz we met a man who, as a warder’s son, had spent his childhood on the island and written up his experience and memories. It was fascinating listening to him. In one part of the old Waterschei coalmine buildings there is a permanent exhibition about the mine and mining, with a lot of original equipment. On one wall there is a map and as I gazed at it, in a sort of echo of the Alcatraz experience, I heard somebody, speaking in Italian, pointing out where various buildings had once stood. We got talking. It transpired he was an immigrant miner’s son, Flemish now, but showing an Italian cousin around.  What did he remember? Constant activity. Lights at night. Noise and dust. And a sense of industry, of productivity, of prosperity. All gone now, of course (the mine closed in 1987), and difficult to imagine that once over 6,000 men toiled far beneath the remaining buildings in tunnels that stretched many kilometres away. Waterschei is a beautiful example of industrial architecture (picture) and doubtless a favourite for photographers. Despite having been gutted it is also a monument, full of ghosts, to a once proud industry. The main entrance to the mine has been sealed with an immense concrete slab (though, thrillingly, there seems to be a passageway through it). I wonder what former miners feel, gazing down at the place where they sunk into the bowls of the earth every day to toil at distant coalfaces… We drove back to Brussels listening to the music of Rocco Granata, son of an Italian miner at Waterschei and himself briefly a miner.

We went to Genk, in Belgian Limburg, this afternoon or, more precisely, to Waterschei, to visit the ninth edition of the roving biennial contemporary art exhibition, Manifesta, which this time is being held in the atmospheric pithead buildings of a former coal mine. (I shall write a separate post about those atmospherics.) The exhibition’s general theme, ‘Deep into the Modern’, gave its curators the possibility of assembling an eclectic mix of pieces in different mediums, many of them making specific reference to their surroundings or to the industrial process more generally ( Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave is here – an oblique genuflection to the 1966 Zwartberg tragedy – and there is also a very good separate historical exhibition about the evolution of the artistic depiction of coalmining). I liked Manuel Duran’s Miners’ Heads (a parade of busts of all shapes and sizes carved out of various materials)  and who could not be moved by Symbolon 1952 (picture), described thus: ‘Spyros Roumeliotis and Polyxeni Papoutsi tore their only image in two; he took the image of his wife to Limburg and she kept the image of her husband in Greece. They stitched the portrait back together when they were reunited.’ But my favourite piece was Sounds from Beneath, by Mikhail Karikis and Uriel Orlow, described thus: ‘Karikis worked with a former miners’ choir from Snowdown Colliery in Kent (closed in 1987). He asked the group of retired miners to recall and ovaclize the sounds of underground activity in the mine. The subsequent soundpiece is sung by the miners and captured in the video created in collaboration with Uriel Orlow.’ You can see and hear the piece here. Screened in the echoing disused mine buildings of Waterschei it was extraordinarily evocative.

This evening I read Christopher Hitchens’s posthumously published collection of essays, Mortality. Cumulatively, the collection is, in Hitchen’s words, an account of ‘living dyingly’. It is full of wrily witty observation – ‘When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen.’  – and illustrative anecdote. For example, Hitchens recounts that the Danish physicist and Nobelist Niels Bohr once hung a horseshoe over his doorway: ‘Appalled friends exclaimed that surely he didn’t put any trust in such pathetic superstition. “No, I don’t,” he replied with composure, “but apparently it works whether you believe in it or not.”‘ In the beginning, when the cancer that would kill him had first been diagnosed, Hitchens hung a few horseshoes over his doorway, but when his end was certain no note of self-pity crept into his writing. Rather, he wrote almost forensically about the irritations and the humiliations and the frustrations of a disease which with supreme irony chose first to rob him of his voice. In one of his essays Hitchens quotes the American educator, Horace Mann: ‘Until you have done something for humanity you should be ashamed to die.’ Hitchens died unashamedly.

I had lunch today with Jean-Claude Eeckhout who, although long since retired, remains a special adviser to the European Commission and an honorary representative on several administrative boards. Jean-Claude was my first director in the secretariat general of the European Commission, back in the mid-1980s. His own European career began at Euratom in the early 1960s. Having worked with Albert Coppé, he was recruited to the Commission’s secretariat general by its first, longstanding Secretary General, Emile Noël, and despite working thereafter for a number of European Commissioners, was always considered to be ‘on loan’ from Noël (who spent an extraordinary twenty-seven years in the top job!). Having known virtually every Commissioner from the 1960s through to the noughties, and having served as an ‘Antici’, Jean-Claude is an endless source of fascinating anecdotes about the Commission and the Council and the integration process more generally. He is also, to my mind, a living link with the very beginning, for Jean-Claude met Jean Monnet. He remembers him as a surprisingly reserved and soft-spoken person, but one who knew his own mind and could be direct. Jean-Claude’s hilarious anecdote about Walter Hallstein, a hot summer’s day, an avion taxi from Strasbourg and a munster cheese stuffed under Hallstein’s seat is best left to the imagination…

The EESC’s Bureau meeting and plenary session will take place next week. Exceptionally, the Bureau will meet on the Monday and the plenary on the Tuesday and Wednesday, rather than the Tuesday, and the Wednesday and Thursday respectively. That means that we have had to advance all of our preparatory meetings by one day, so early this morning we held our traditional preparatory management board meeting and a little later the ‘pre-session’ meeting that brings together all of the services involved in organising the Bureau and the plenary. My ‘high-tech’ photograph to illustrate this post is a photo of the screen in front of me, as chairman, of the pre-session meeting room (JDE 63, for those who like to know these things). All went well, as always. As this information briefing explains, we have European Trade Commissioner, Karel De Gucht, coming and a thematic debate about organised civil society in global governance to look forward to, in addition to the plenary’s traditional work of debating and adopting opinions. Among the latter is an opinion on the cost of ‘non-Europe’, but I’ll return to that theme in a separate post.

To the EESC’s Communication Group meeting this morning, chaired by Anna Maria Darmanin, to listen to a guest speaker, former European Commission spokesperson and head of the Commission’s Brussels Representation, Willy Helin. A friend of many years’ standing (I have previously blogged about him here), Willy had come primarily to talk about a charitable organisation, Give EUR Hope,  he helped to establish and which enables EU officials to give to deserving local projects, but also to advise on how the EESC could be better integrated into the local communities that surround it. One of the problems the EESC faces is that it lies at the boundary between three different communes but, as Willy pointed out, most of Brussels’ communes now have an echevin of European affairs and so making structured contact with the local echevins is clearly the next step.

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso’s State of the Union speech before the European Parliament today gave a strong sense of history in the making. As EESC President Staffan Nilsson declared in a supportive reaction, ‘what was inevitable has now been said: for the future of the EU, we must not be afraid to speak of a federation of nation-states and we must continue to deepen cooperation. Let us build it together and have the courage to turn a challenge into an opportunity.’ I have always felt myself privileged to live through so many historical developments, sometimes with a ringside seat. I joined the EU institutions as the Single European Act was being implemented. Since then my generation have seen the single market created, successive waves of enlargement, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the Maastricht Treaty’s establishment of the economic and monetary union process, the Schengen Agreement, the Lisbon Treaty’s creation of a European External Action Service and the European Parliament’s coming of age as a twin arm of the EU’s legislative and budgetary authority, to name but some of the more salient developments. Now, as if that were not already extraordinarily rapid progress in a period of less than thirty years, fiscal union and federation may be just around the corner. I think back to my thoughts in Washington at the FDR memorial (Barroso’s ‘Decisive Deal’ is surely close to FDR’s ‘New Deal’) and Habermas’s analysis  and see that the current crisis may well have encouraged the sense of a common destiny that Habermas wrote about.

I found myself watching Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 spy thriller, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy this evening. The plot of John Le Carré’s original novel of the same name is a wonderfully atmospheric sprawling thing that twists and turns like cigar smoke in a club room. A whole generation of Le Carré fans was spoilt by Alec Guinness’s brilliant portrayal of the main protagonist, Smiley, in a 1979 BBC mini-series. Spread over seven parts, the series had the time to familiarise its viewers with the espionage slang, extended cast and complicated plot. Not so the film, though the scriptwriters clearly made valiant efforts to condense the plot whilst not losing the atmospherics. And it is not that Gary Oldman does not give an excellent performance as a world-weary Smiley; it’s just that my generation can’t help but compare him with Guinness’s portrayal (fueled by nostalgia, no doubt). And is it possible, I wondered, for people who never experienced the Cold War to understand just why intelligence services became such obsessive nests of intrigue and counter-intrigue? I watched the film with two youngsters and they said they had enjoyed it and had liked the plot’s portrayal of paranoia and trust and distrust, so I had better shut up.