This morning I and my secretariat were shown around the works and the innards of the Jacques Delors building. Luc Raes was our expert guide. We started on the roof, where we admired the huge machines that suck in outside air, filter it, humidify it, warm it and push it through the building. There are machines that suck the air out again afterwards. We visited the chillers and the cooling tower. We saw the water heaters for the kitchens and the heating units. For everything there is a back up unit. Then we went down to the basement, where rivulets from the nearby now subterranean Maelbeek are channeled across the rooms. We saw where the electricity arrives and is transformed down and then distributed. We visited the battery room, constantly on stand by to provide energy should there ever be a sudden power cut. And we saw the massive emergency paraffin tank and visited the back-up diesel generator (always warmed by electrical circuits so that it can immediately be run at full power). The purpose of our visit was primarily educational (I will know better what I am talking about in management board meetings from now on!) but was also to show my personal commitment to the Committee’s efforts to be ever more ‘green’ and efficient. I was struck by how clean everything was – no dirt, grime, grease or fluff anywhere. I was also struck by the tailor-made insulating ‘jackets’ (there are some in the picture) designed to ensure that as little heat and energy as possible is lost. Whilst we were on the roof Luc showed us the new lift motors. These high-techie things do not only balance weights to minimise energy consumption – they also use downward travel to generate electricity which is fed back into the circuits. In other words, we should use the stairs to go up, but if we use the lifts to go down, we help cut our energy bill!

I was impatient to see this film. I am a great admirer of Ridley Scott and his latest film has been getting good reviews in the British press, so tonight we went and watched Prometheus. First, one piece of excellent news for The Wire fans; Stringer Bell (I mean Idris Elba) lives on, Elba playing the (space) ship’s captain. Second, the film is great entertainment, with sophisticated special effects, a jinking plot and lots of thrills and spills. Third, although Noomi Rapace, playing the heroine Elizabeth Shaw, keeps up Alien‘s ‘innovation’ of a strong female lead, she does not reach Sigourney Weaver levels (we always knew that was impossible). Fourth, this ‘tight’ plot has some loose ends, it’s difficult to see how the film could serve directly as a ‘prequel’ and at the end the plot too neatly leaves an opening for ‘sequels’ other than the Alien franchise. Job sort of done, then? Yes, and I enjoyed myself, but I was a little disappointed. In the first, great Alien film, less is definitely more. Here, more is definitely less. But if Scott stumbles it is at a high altitude and I couldn’t help thinking that the film was deliberately referential and at times almost tongue-in-cheek. I have scoured the reviews and apparently nobody else feels that way. But when a severed head wise-cracked as it was stuffed in a handbag I couldn’t help think that I’d seen that scene somewhere else before.  So: go, enjoy, but keep your expectations reasonably low.

This morning I chaired the usual Monday morning management board meeting. Normally we meet in the ‘flagship’ Jacques Delors building but, conscious that our staff are housed in five other buildings as well, we occasionally meet in one of those. So this morning we met in the Van Maerlant building, as guests of the Committee’s Head of Communication, Peter Lindvald-Nilsen (his meeting room, with my cup of tea, in the picture). Afterwards, I got to thinking about the reincarnation of buildings. The Van Maerlant building was erected to serve as an annex to the European Parliament’s ‘main’ building in Brussels, which is now the Jacques Delors building, housing the two advisory bodies. As a young official in the European Commission’s secretariat general I used to come to the Van Maerlant building, seeking out MEPs for particular messages. Then the Parliament moved into its new complex and the building was taken over by European Commission Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC). By then a Head of Unit in DG EAC, I used to come to the Van Maerlant building for meetings with the Commissioner and the Director-General. And now I am Secretary General of the European Economic and Social Committee and come to the building in that guise: in effect, over three decades the building has housed three institutions. Are those ghosts I see wandering its corridors?

We watched Alain Resnais’s 1959 classic, Hiroshima mon amour, this evening. Based on a screenplay by Marguerite Youcenar, the film consists of a 36 hour conversation between a French actress (played by Emmanuèlle Riva) and a Japanese architect (played by Eiji Okada). The story takes place in a recovering Hiroshima (lots of interesting historical footage), where the actress has come to act in an anti-war film. She and the architect have had a brief fling (both are married) but now she must go and so they must say goodbye. However, the man becomes fascinated and keeps returning to her and their conversation, which is punctuated by flashbacks representing her reminiscences about a youthful relationship she had with a young German soldier. After liberation, she had her hair cropped and was ostracised as a collaborator. The script and the film cleverly juxtapose the horrors of her youth with the horrors of the people of Hiroshima (many of the survivors lost their hair), including the architect’s family (he was conscripted). Indeed, both she and he are trying to relate back to events that they cannot fully comprehend. She in particular floats between the now and the then, and he sometimes becomes what she once had.

This evening we watched The Way Things Go, a 1987 art film by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The latter died in April this year, so the viewing had a sort of timeliness. The film is probably the artists’ most famous work. Over some thirty minutes we watch a series of chain reactions, the one after the other, spread out along a thirty or forty metre length of some inside space. Some of the causal sequences seem obvious and inevitable (a rocket fuse, for example). Others at first seem possible at most and only later become probable and then inevitable (gently swinging weights and rocking tyres, for example). Created in 1987, it is a metaphor for all sorts of things. It is, at one level, comic and, at another, a stern warning.

Rather than following the signposts to Le Grand Hornu we followed our own, map-established route, and therefore drove through Jemappes and Quaregnon. This is Le Centre, the heart of the Borinage. The slag heaps may have trees and shrubs growing on them now, but there are still plenty of relics of the great mining industry that once provided the economic lifeblood of this region. Indeed, the mixture of modest miners’ cottages and industrial architecture surrounded by green fields reminded me powerfully of the similar mixture still to be found in the Welsh valleys. High unemployment is another blight both regions have had to face. We stopped in Quaregnon to admire the extraordinary First World War monument (photo credit Jean-Pol Grandmont) and, curiosity piqued, I then looked up this town on the internet and discovered that at Easter 1894 the Charter of Quaregnon , the basic doctrinal text for Belgian Socialists, was signed here. Says Wiki, “The Charter of Quaregnon survived time and two World Wars. Only after 1979, when the Belgian Socialist Party (BSP) fell apart in a Flemish SP and a Walloon PS, newer Charters were created.” So now I know.

To the Musée des Arts Contemporains (‘MAC’s) at Le Grand Hornu this afternoon, for the last day of an exhibition curated by the Museum’s Director, Laurent Busine. The exhibition was entitled ‘Le grand Atelier, Ou le Traité de l’admirable diversité de la vie et du monde,‘ and Busine had brought a very personal, almost autobiographical and at times elegiac, touch to the eclectic but thematic selection of works and objects. This was not only an exhibition for the young but it was one that they could surely relate to, with its stuffed birds’ eggs and nests alongside Magritte sketches, Fautrier portraits and August Sander photographs. The exhibition opened with two wonderful videos (on loan from the Liverpool Tate) by Rineke Dijkstra, ‘See a woman crying’ and ‘Ruth drawing Picasso’. They were worth the trip in themselves. Everybody has their own favourites, of course, but among the assembled objects I would single out the skeleton of a real giant (picture). Julius Koch, alias Le géant Constantin, was born in Reutlingen in 1872 and died in Mons in 1902. He measured 256 cm. There was, I found, something deeply moving about gazing down on the massive bones of a true giant. The exhbition is alas now over but I would recommend anybody who doesn’t know Le Grand Hornu to go and visit this extraordinary former industrial site and ideal workers’ city.

This morning I put the finishing touches to an entry I was invited to draft for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. It is quite a challenge to summarise a rich life in the round within eight hundred words, whilst also providing all of the standard biographical information. The person in question, Baroness Elles (1921-2009), was the daughter of a larger-than-life British adventurer who was helped to escape from a prison camp by a French woman who was to become his wife. At an age when most of us are still wondering what to do, Elles had won an honours degree in French and Italian from the University of London, served in the WAAF, joined a team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park, married a dashing fighter pilot and become a barrister. She went on to be a social worker, raise a family, and then became politically active, serving in the House of Lords, the United Nations General Assembly and the European Parliament. That is not to mention all of her charitable and educational work – oh, and yes, her work as a lawyer. And that’s just the 1970s! Her sheer energy was remarkable. It was, absolutely, a long life richly lived.

Early this morning I followed the Monnet method again, this time walking around the Arboretum in Tervuren. The picture is just ten minutes away from central Brussels. By the end of the walk I had thought my way through several issues and got a lot of good exercise and fresh air into the bargain. There are several magnificent arboreal avenues on the circuit we walk. This particular circuit begins and ends with an avenue of oaks, which always puts things in perspective. My rapid internet research has been unfruitful but somebody definitely once said something along the lines of ‘there are two things a man cannot do in one lifetime; build a cathedral and plant an avenue of oaks.’

At lunchtime today, the two Committees formally welcomed the two hives and the honey bees installed on our seventh floor roof by organising a first tasting of their honey. I therefore donned a protective suit and went to the hives to smoke the bees and then lift out a frame (yep, that’s me in the picture) already miraculously full of honeycombs and honey (blog readers will remember that the hives only arrived on 7 May). During the process I learnt a lot. First, I had thought that the smoke was used to make the bees drowsy but that is not at all the case. I only gave them three puffs (the smoke is made from dried lavender pellets) and the purpose is to get them thinking that they might need to abandon the hive (because of fire). When this happens, the bees start to consume honey and when a bee consumes honey the bee’s abdomen distends, supposedly making it difficult to make the necessary flexes to sting. In any case, a sated bee is less aggressive and these bees are anyway particularly docile. The second thing I learned is that our bees have probably established a foraging area of about ten square kilometres and that they fly prodigious distances. The third is that urban bee communities produce twice as much honey as their country cousins. Now, as our President, Staffan Nilsson, pointed out in his speech for the occasion, the presence of the hives is a good thing in itself but they are also there to educate our members and staff about the fact that our bee populations are in worrying decline.  The honey was deliciously sweet and it was oh so satisfying to be tasting it!