Throughout the sensational events of May this year I kept DSK out of my blog. The whole thing seemed so extraordinary and his status and reputation encouraged and enflamed passions on all sides of the argument (I shall never forget a near-hysterical discussion at a dinner party that seemed more like a lynching party warm-up than a rational discussion of the facts available at the time). Today’s Financial Times newspaper has published a full page analysis by Edward Jay Epstein, an American investigative journalist, based on hotel and phone records and images taken from CCTV cameras (a longer version was published in the New York Review of Books). I shall continue to refrain from all judgemental comment but, if I may put it this way, the simple records and images provide an awful lot of  scope for conspiracy theorists. As the joke has it, ‘just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not after you.’ Read the analysis and see for yourself.

I have gone through this week with two songs playing in my mind, both beautifully sung and both, as it happens, pretty easy to play. The first, Make You Feel My Love, performed by Adele, was written by Bob Dylan and, in the manner of many of his beautiful songs, was leapt upon by performers (Bryan Ferry among them). The second, Video Games, was written and is performed by the fascinating Lana Del Rey. For both songs I am providing the links to ‘unplugged’ performances on the With Jools Holland show, where both are basically piano and voice pieces (and Del Rey’s wobbling voice confirming this was among her first live performances). Beautiful voices, haunting songs. Can it be coincidence that their names share so many of the same letters? (Only joking – please don’t write in!)

This week has whistled by in a series of back-to-back meetings, some to chair, some one-on-one, from early to late, but this afternoon, thanks to the kind invitation of the President of the EESC’s Various Interests Group, Luca Jahier, I was able to sit down in one place for a few hours and actively participate in a brainstorming session about the role European universities can play in Europe, both in relation to the current crisis and, more broadly, in relation to the European integration process. Jahier had invited a number of his Group members active in the academic sphere and a number of representatives from the European university sector. To encourage the sense of a free exchange, we met in one of the Committee’s circular meeting rooms. I suspect my invitation also had something to do with a previous incarnation, since my last job in the European Commission was managing higher education exchange programmes in the Directorate-General for Education and Culture. There were in any case some old friends around the table. The implicit question on the table was could and should Europe’s universities refind the sense of cultural community that once used to exist – before the arrival of the nation state, that is. Answers, on a postcard, please…

The European Economic and Social Committee’s steering committee on the EU’s Europe 2020 strategy met jointly today with representatives of the national economic and social councils in the member states. The EESC has been invited by the European Commission’s President, José Manuel Barroso, to coordinate relations with the national councils to ensure that organised civil society’s voice, at both European and member state level, is properly fed into the EU’s ongoing deliberations on how sustainable and inclusive growth can best be guaranteed. Understandably, the current crisis and austerity policies added a sharp edge to the discussions which revealed a broad consensus on the importance of ensuring employment-rich growth.

A frequently overlooked particularity of the European Economic and Social Committee is that it is composed of representatives of civil society organisations in the member states – and not, despite the adjective ‘European’, of pan-European organisations. In order to create synergies on issues of common interest, the Committee created a Liaison Group composed, on the one hand, of EESC members and, on the other, of representatives of European civil society organisations. This afternoon the Liaison Group met, co-chaired by EESC President, Staffan Nilsson, and the President of the European Civic Forum, Jean-Marc Roirant, and held in-depth discussions on the the preparation of the European Year of Citizens (2013) and on the theme of social entrepreneurship. The EESC’s rapporteurs, Andris Gobinš and Ariane Rodert, respectively, deliberately set out to consult the Liaison Group at a very early stage in their work. This was clearly appreciated and the richness of the debates gave evidence once again of the added value of such structured cooperation, cooperation that will continue, on the one hand, through a joint hearing with members of the study group  responsible for preparing the Committees’s opinion on the Commission’s proposal on the European Year of Citizens (2013) and, on the other, on the occasion of the preparation of an opinion on the communication from the Commission entitled Social Business initiative.

Today I hosted one of my occasional working lunches with all of the EESC’s female managers. I wanted to know how they saw the possible consequences of the reform package that was tabled earlier this year by the European Commission. The Committee is, in comparative terms, a tiny institution and since the 2004 reforms has had to compete, together with all the other smaller institutions, to recruit the ‘brightest and the best’ from what is, in effect, a single pool of candidates. Arguably, this is a relatively more important imperative for a smaller institution, since one unsuccessful (management) appointment may block a key position for a long time. One way of competing is to provide attractive working conditions. Since the Committee is in any case both economic and social it has always sought to provide the best possible working conditions for its staff. Hence today’s wide-ranging and frank discussions.

The Tithe Farm about to disappear

‘There’s only one good thing about a small town,’ says Andy Warhol in Lou Reed’s Songs for Drella, ‘you hate it and you want to get out.’ I grew up in North West London. I don’t know whether I hated it but, like my brothers, I got out. Was it, though, the cultural desert of my (selective?) memories; all pub crawls, endless rounds of pints of bitter and late night Indian meals (inter alia because the Indian restaurants had licences to serve beer after the pubs’ closing hours)? In part through keeping this blog, I have latterly realised that the cinema was a much more frequent cultural port of call than I remembered. Now, I also realise, there was a lot of music going on and I heard much of it. In a separate post I intend to recall how I was there when The Who were discovered at the Railway Hotel, just around the corner from where I lived (oh, yes!). But today, through surfing, I came across this website (Marmalade Skies) and re-discovered all those gigs of my late teens. The sheer quantity was because just short bus rides away from my house there were two highly active centres of folk/progressive/pub rock music: Harrow Technical College and School of Art (universally known as ‘Harrow Tech’) and the Tithe Farm House in North Harrow. To these could be added occasional gigs at the Kings Head Pub at Harrow-on-the-Hill and a memorable one-off concert by String Driven Thing at the very Blackwell School where I had sung in a school choirs competition just yesterday, it seemed to me at the time. (I’ll never forget the thrill of hearing a distorted electric violin for the first time.) And there, dear reader, were all those groups – and I saw all of them (some of them several times): Hatfield and the North; Good Habit; Capability Brown; Ace; Heavy Metal Kids; Jack the Lad; Starry Eyed and Laughing; the later Troggs; Kilburn and the High Roads; Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers; Keith Christmas; Byzantium; Kevin Coyne (a brilliant troubador); Fusion Orchestra; Greenslade; Sassafras; Jonathan Kelly’s Outside; Ric Lee’s Nexus; Gentle Giant. All of this was a short bus ride away. Of course, just a short train ride away I could, and did, see the likes of David Bowie, the remnants of Cream (Ginger Baker’s Gurvitz Army, for example), Rod Stewart, Pink Floyd, the Stones and… but all of that must be for another post. I wanted to end on a happy note but, then, when I went looking for an illustration I found the following, much sadder, site. For the simple brutal truth is that every single one of the buildings I have mentioned in this post has gone.

On the train last Sunday to Liège it was difficult to ignore the tags and graffiti scrawled over trains and carriages and walls and bridges. Sometimes, tags can be pretty. Mostly, this urban scribble is offensive to the eye. But where to draw the line? I have long been a fan of the likes of Banksy and it seems to me that Brussels has quite a few imitators. When a piece of graffiti is well done it can be attractive. I spotted the example in my picture in downtown Brussels the other day. I spotted it by chance, for it is on a wall in a not particularly well frequented street. The tree trunk is real enough. The branch behind it is a witty piece of graffiti, complete with transistor radio with wings. I like the anonymity of it; the fact that somebody had the idea and then spent time preparing the stencil and stealthily painting the branch, and it is neither messy nor offensive. And yet, technically-speaking, it is a piece of vandalism.

Not all the sugar beet around Berthem is heading off to the refineries. We came across this lovely bunch early this morning, munching away at a trough of beets. There was something, we agreed, almost biblical about the scene. Though it doesn’t come across in the photo I took, the calves were arranged around the trough in a way reminiscent of the table in Da Vinci’s Last Supper. There was a sort of madness in their eyes and in the chomping, dribbling mouths and there was, above all, a constant and very loud sound of munching. Elsewhere, we saw plenty of pheasants (I read somewhere that an English fish-and-chip shop is selling deep-fried pheasants’ breasts, so plentiful have they become) and – something rather special – a completely white heron. It was not, I am convinced, an egret, but a heron. Now, I know white heron do exist in Australasia, but in Europe? Could it have been an albino? I hope somebody will put me right.

Well, it wasn’t quite a disaster, but this evening (don’t ask why) we watched a 2010 thriller entitled Faster. The shame is that this could have been a good film. It starts strongly when ‘Driver’, played by Dwayne Johnson, is about to be released from prison. The warden asks him if he has any questions. ‘Yes,’ says Driver. ‘Where’s the exit?’ Sadly, it’s pretty much the best line in the film. When Driver is released he is in such a hurry to wreak vengeance (for the murder of his brother) that he starts running down the road and that is also a powerful image. But, then, before we know it we have descended into gratuitous gore and silly car chases. Thereafter, there are occasional strong moments (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is particularly good as a travelling preacher who redeems himself and thus avoids death by admitting his guilt but also by arguing that it was through his evil that he learnt to do good). Dwayne Johnson does scarey and scared and desperate and determined very well but his strong characterisation is let down by a poor script. Too many loose ends and telegraphed plots. Oh well.