I continued with my ‘meeting the troops’ series this morning, enjoying a working breakfast with the Registry and Archives Unit of the European Economic and Social Committee. Here is another important engine house in the Committee’s secretariat. This particular ‘machine’ works, and works very well: nine plenary sessions a year, eleven Bureau meetings, servicing the Quaestors, keeping the document flow going… And, as with the Committee’s other engine houses, because it works so well, we tend to take it a little for granted, although I never cease to be impressed by the efficiency of such Units, especially when compared with the larger institutions. The registry is also, as my predecessor used to say, the ‘guardian of the temple’. The registry is, for example, the custodian of the Rules of Procedere and of their implementing provisions. However, as the Head of Unit, Dominique-François Bareth, pointed out, the fact that the Registry must, by the very nature of its responsibilities, be prudent and conservative, does not mean that it cannot be thoroughly modern in its methodology and philosophy. This morning we had an excellent, amicable, frank and encouraging exchange about the challenges facing the Committee, from ever-increasing workloads to ever-shrinking deadlines. I learnt a huge amount, thoroughly enjoyed myself and couldn’t resist a sticky bun at the end! Oh, and, oh yes, much to my delight I learnt that we had an accomplished, prize-winning poetess in our midst.

I went this afternoon to the EESC’s Budget Group, at the invitation of its Chairman, Vice-President Jacek Krawczyk, in order to listen in to the Group’s discussions about rapid follow-up to the recommendations in the European Parliament’s draft resolution on granting discharge for the 2010 budget and also to give the Group information on how the Committee’s administration is preparing for the austerity and reform measures that the European Commission has proposed and that are currently in the legislative pipeline. The donkey work is done for the 2013 budget drafting exercise, in the sense that the draft budget has been approved and sent off to the Commission. We must now await the outcome of the budgetary authority’s deliberations to know exactly what form our budget for next year will take but, whatever the outcome, there will still be two resource challenges ahead: the accession of Croatia, and the implementation of reforms that will include human resource reductions. My message to the Budget Group was a positive one. Both processes are well on track. The Committee is a mature institution and nowhere is that maturity more in evidence than in the efficient and consensual way in which it faces up to such challenges.

This midday I accompanied EESC Vice-President Anna Maria Darmanin to the opening of an information session commendably organised by two of the Committees’ Croatian trainees, Larisa Basic and Martina Stojakovic, and attended by a number of Croatian representatives, including Tanja Babic and Maja Adamic from the Croatian mission to the European Union. The purpose of the conference was to give information about a country that in July next year will become the European Union’s 28th member state. In my brief opening remarks I recounted how I sometimes had to pinch myself to make sure that I wasn’t dreaming. When I first started to work in an EU institution in 1985, Spain and Portugal were about to join (Greece had joined in 1981). Now, the EESC has a Swedish President and a Polish and a Maltese Vice-President – the membership of those three countries wasn’t even on the radar screen in 1985. The successive waves of enlargement of the European Union have been a great success story because, very soon after each new member state has joined, it feels as though the state in question had always belonged and, indeed, should always have belonged. I have no doubt that it will very soon feel that way with Croatia and the Croatians.

To the Musical Instruments Museum  (Brussels) this morning, to a privately-organised concert to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday. The music was provided by four brilliant young musicians, including the friend’s highly talented daughter, and organised via Musica Mundi. On the menu were Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Chopin. The latter’s Impromptu Fantasy was performed so brilliantly that it had the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. But also on the menu was some more exotic though equally beautiful fare. We had the first movement of Henri Vieuxtemps’s Violin Concerto, for example; a Tarantella by Pablo de Sarasate; and Palimpsestes, by Michel Lysight. They were all wonderful to listen to and wonderfully performed, but my favourite  in the whole concert (if I had to choose) was a lyrically evocative Prayer for cello and piano by Ernest Bloch. Somehow, the young cellist got all of the passion, sorrow and hope of the diaspora into this remarkable piece. And not one of the musicians was more than fourteen years of age! The concert was an immensely privileged and inspiring experience.

A colleague’s brother, Giles Milton, has just written an account, Wolfram, of his German father-in-law’s remarkable wartime experiences. Thanks to a kind friend’s gift (thank you, PC!), I have just finished the book and would recommend it to anybody seeking an impression of how the last war was lived by young Germans and middle Germany (if I may call it that). A budding sculptor and son of an eccentric artist, Wolfram was too young fully to comprehend the way in which the Nazis’ ideological grip fast turned to a murderous stranglehold in his home town of Pforzheim, but he could not help but notice the book-burning and the increasingly violent anti-semitism and its results. He was certainly constantly aware of the moral dilemmas his liberal parents and their friends faced, where even minor acts of defiance resulted in major retribution. Though they managed always to avoid becoming party members, the shadows approached… And then the young Wolfram was conscripted into the Reich Labour Service and sent to the Eastern Front. A close shave with death (from diptheria) in the Crimea enabled him to avoid the certain death of his friends and contemporaries at Stalingrad. After a lengthy convalescence, he was sent to the Western Front, to Normandy, just before the Allies landed. After surviving several terrifying aerial bombardments he was caught and sent to the UK and then the US, where he saw out the rest of the war as a prisoner. All contact with his family was lost. Meanwhile, on 23 February 1945 an allied incendiary bombing raid on Pforzheim destroyed some 86% of the town and killed 17,000 inhabitants… There are object lessons in these experiences that we Europeans must surely not forget!

I have finished Philbrick’s Mayflower. It ends on a sombre and philosophical note, after chapters and chapters recounting the sad story of the conflict known as King Philip’s War. It was perhaps the bloodiest conflict ever in North America. Friends turned on friends. The native Indians turned on one another as well as on the colonialists and, in the end, the cleansing – it is not too strong a word – was decisive. It was not just the bloodshed (over 600 colonists and 3,000 Native Americans died, including several hundred native captives who were tried and executed or enslaved and sold in Bermuda). But King Philip’s had been the ultimate gamble – winner takes all. He had sold land to buy arms to try to win back his people’s land, but it didn’t work. It couldn’t work and did he, I wonder, know that in his heart of hearts? He was portrayed in contemporary accounts as somebody who preferred to run rather than fight – indeed, he was shot dead whilst running away from an ambush. But what would otherwise have been left? As his death proved – nothing. A few summers ago I was in Rhode Island, briefly. I wish I had read this book before that trip for so many of the places I visited had an older, alternative history. In a previous blog post I described this story as a series of counter-factuals and hypothetical conditionals, but surely settlement by the Europeans was inevitable. King Philip’s War may have been foolhardy, but if so it was the foolhardiness of a last throw of  loaded dice.

This evening I became the last person in the whole wide world to watch Slumdog Millionaire. I know it won three hundred and fity million Oscars and was nominated for two million more, but there was something about the way this film was hyped that made me reluctant to see it. And now I have seen it, and I can’t really make up my mind. It unashamedly describes itself as a feelgood movie and it does, indeed, leave the unjudgemental viewer feeling good. The child actors are wonderful, full of innocent charm. This is Dickens in Mumbai, complete with equivalents of the Artful Dodger and Fagin. But in its determination to make the viewer feel good, I can’t help feel that the film ducks its social responsibilties (Do films have social responsibilities? Discuss). Crushing poverty is depicted as an age of joyful innocence. The slums are being replaced by towers to Mamon and a former slumdog almost regrets their passing. And at the end the Bollywood knob is turned full on; true love will always find a way – in Mumbai Central Station in the rush hour, if needs be.  And why don’t we have a feel good dance afterwards, just for fun? If it hadn’t been for all that hype, this might have been a nice little feelgood movie.

Thanks to a friend, NC, I have just read a deeply moving collection of poetry by Peter Dale entitled Mortal Fire. The collection is divided into seven sections. It begins with an estranged son addressing a dead father (‘Unaddressed Letter’) and it ends with a dying father addressing an absent son (‘It Is Finished’). In between we inter alia accompany a world-weary surgeon in his reflections on lost idealistic compassion and explore the strain drug addiction places on friends and children. The ben trovato overall title comes from George Herbert: ‘Man is no starre, but a quick coal/Of mortall fire…’ The first poem is a hard act to follow. The son recognises that he is becoming his father as he gazes in the mirror (‘I watched my face become your likeness…’ and ‘Your wrinkles soon will ride my features…’) and he is eloquent on that perhaps universal sentiment, part guilt, part frustration, that all children feel towards dead parents – ‘And there are other words I would have had for you…’ , as well as on the critical thoughts we can now have without causing hurt or undermining love; ‘I could only say this now you’re dead. I know/It cannot wound you secretly…’ Thank you, NC!

I have just finished Philip K. Dick’s 1965 sci fi tour de force, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Having finished the book, I went on the web and stumbled across a rather sniffy-with-hindsight review by another author I admire, Michael Moorcock. None of Dick’s ideas are original, sniffs Moorcock; his characterisation is poor and his speed-enhanced writing results in dizzying plots and the constant risk of cod philosophy. Well, Moorcock would know, but I think this particular book stands up there with The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Indeed, for descriptions of drug-tempered dystopias I would put it on my bookshelf alongside Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Dick’s descriptions of drug-induced trances and his weaving of reality and fantasy are very cleverly done, always leading to that most fundamental of questions, what is reality? Maybe, as Moorcock suggests, Dick did increasingly lose his way in the 1970s but in these novels he comes across like sci fi’s version of Raymond Chandler, getting the intriguing plot down and his characters from A to B between swigs from the bottle and cynical, world-weary asides (‘It was the smile of someone who wasn’t going,’ says Dick’s Barney Mayerson, for example). In the end, it is not clear to Mayerson or the reader that he has met God, but he does encounter a being that inspires wonder as it survives through others by becoming others.

After the mountainside yesterday, it was the lakeside today, to Villa Carlotta, Tremezzo, to admire the camelias and the rhododenrons. Our timing was perfect. Everything was in flower; blazing oranges and mauves and reds. But the star of the show, to my mind, was a massive wisteria vine that had been trained up a nearby tree (picture). From below, the conjuring trick is perfect and the glorious wisteria seems to be a free-standing tree in its own right. Wisterias soon develop thick trunks but the one that holds up this monster is like an elephant’s midrift. The villa was a present to Charlotte of Prussia from her mum. Alas, Charlotte died in 1855 in child-birth at the tragically young age of 24. Her husband, George II of Saxe-Meiningen, turned his passions to the Villa’s gardens among other things.