This afternoon the Committee hosted an extraordinary meeting bringing together the members of two of its specialised sections (SOC and ECO) and of its steering committee on the Europe 2020 strategy to consider the theme of overcoming the crisis: towards a policy programme for sustainable recovery. As government crises raged in Greece and Italy and the eurozone’s problems spooked the markets, it could have been argued that facing up to those challenges overshadowed all other priorities. But the message I took away from those parts of the meeting that I was able to attend was that even if we are currently sailing through a storm we should not lose sight of our port of destination nor of the route we wish to take to get there. In other words, the Europe 2020 strategy, with its emphasis on sustainable growth, highly educated workforces and the maintenance of social solidarity remains entirely pertinent. The reinforcement of economic governance may be a necessity, but it is not an end in itself.

At midday I sat in on a lunch organised by a number of British members to welcome four representatives of the UK voluntary sector, drawn from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and ranging from a young volunteer to an older one (77 years old!). This is the year of volunteering, an initiative that the Committee has strongly supported, and the civil servant who has been heading up the Commission’s activities, John Macdonald, was also a guest at the table. Each of the four recounted their experiences and the way they had come to be volunteers. Before dashing away to my next meeting I told them that it was no coincidence that the EESC was so supportive. From my perspective the Committee’s members are also volunteers. They don’t get EU salaries and spend most of their time with their organisations back in the member states.

Over the past week we’ve managed to view the trilogy of Bourne films (The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)), a cracking good adventure series. The films, loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s novels (with the same titles), follow the adventures of a brainwashed CIA trained assassin whose original personality (and ethics), as they reassert themselves, turn him into a poacher-turned-gamekeeper. A few years back, two management theorists produced a learned paper about the effect of assassinations on institutions and war. Their study seemed to indicate that, in their words, ‘successful removal of autocrats produce(s) sustained moves towards democracy.’ By coincidence, the original personality and ethics of the Jason Bourne character in the trilogy first reassert themselves as he is about to assassinate an autocrat (retired). Ever since I found myself out on a Scottish hillside accompanying a stag hunt I have wondered why they go to all the bother of frogsuits and disguises. Frederick Forsyth got it right. I’ll never forget the sight of a stag jerking and collapsing and his companions looking on in puzzlement before then panicking and dashing away; the bullet had reached the stag long before the sound of the shot. A quick look on wiki confirmed that today’s high velocity sniper rifles can have an effective range of up to two kilometres…

Earlier this week, on 31 October, the United Nations calculated that the 7 billionth human being was born. There has been a spate of learned articles and opinion pieces about what this means for us all, with many references to Thomas Malthus and concerns expressed about the earth’s capacity to house and feed us all. Nevertheless, most commentators are agreed that within the next fifteen years or so we’ll pass the 8 billion mark and will still be discussing whether it’s a good thing or not. A special Financial Times supplement on New Demographics even took the projection to 26.8 billion by 2100. Tucked away in the analysis, though, was a worrying projection much closer to home: ‘Projections suggest that to maintain a stable dependency ratio – the relative size of the working and non-working populations – Europe will have to admit a potentially destabilising 1.3 bn migrants by 2050. The political and social backlash of such widespread immigration could be severe.’ This is almost the stuff of science fiction. Whether you call a billion a thousand million or a million million, the current population of Turkey is (just to give a measure of comparison) 78 million. Where on earth are Europeans going to find 1.3 bn migrants, and where on earth will they go?

Today I finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, the second in his ‘Border Trilogy’, the first being All the Pretty Horses. I almost gave up on this book a third of the way through. This was because I didn’t realise I was only a third of the way through (I am reading the trilogy in one volume). What I had taken for a lengthy, heavily religious, closing exegesis of an epilogue was in fact simply the closing reflections on the first of three journeys sixteen year-old protagonist Billy Parham takes from New Mexico to Mexico. Each of his quixotic missions fails. In the meantime, he comes of age but the grown man ends this bleak, melancholic, meditative, philosophical and, perhaps above all, biblical story weeping in the middle of a road, as alone as he has been throughout his adventures. The crossing is not just between civilisation and savagery, new and old, youth and adulthood, innocence and wisdom, man and animal, belief and desperation, but also between faith and fatalism. The Parham we leave at the end of this book is a sort of bleak cross between Job and Sisyphus. I wonder what McCarthy will do to the poor soul in Cities of the Plain. The Crossing is not as tightly written as it might have been. But even when McCarthy is not at his very best he is still very good.

About twenty years ago I bought a small brochure published by the Société Royale Belge de Géographie entitled ‘Itinérarires des mégalithes en Wallonie’. To my shame and frustration I have yet to follow the itinerary, though I have often planned to do it. This holiday break was no different; I was determined to follow the itinerary and then things got in the way. But this morning, as a consolation, I inadvertently stumbled across a wonderful menhir. I had got up before dawn, intent on a good long run through the Belgian Famennes, and there I saw the stone, after about six kilometres, in a back garden, hidden behind parked cars. Who knows its age? 5,000 or 4,000 B.C., maybe, or perhaps more recent, but still clearly ancient. In any case, I always feel humbled in the presence of such inscrutable proof of our longevity. This one has the classic shape of most menhirs, being thin from one angle and broad from another. It also has a clear animal form. (The shape coincidentally echoes that of the Star Wars AT-AT Walkers.) Its irregular shape would surely have made it difficult to manhandle and yet men did this and now it is and has been for a very long time (a hint of Cormac McCarthy creeping in there).

After a delightfully long and lazy Sunday lunch we decided to walk the dog just as night was falling. By the time we got to Berthem it was, theoretically, pitch black (no moon) and yet we were able to walk for an hour-and-a-half in the dark without any trouble at all, as though a full moon were shining behind us. The reason? Low cloud cover and the reflected city lights of Leuven and Brussels. If this reflected light enabled us to walk around without any difficulty I wonder what sort of effect it has on animal life – both those that normally are inactive at night and those that are specialised in hunting in the absence of light.

Sad news in this morning’s Belgian newspapers of the death yesterday of Willy De Clercq, a well-known Liberal politician, but also a familiar figure in European politics, as a Commissioner and as a member of the European Parliament. I knew him, at a distance, as a member of the Commission but when he went to the Parliament (again) I got to know him quite well and I liked him a lot. He was President of the European Parliament’s External Relations Committee, which I was following as a representative of the European Commission’s Secretariat General. I remember the distinctive shock of white hair and the bow ties and the polyglot introductions and the mannerisms (‘Bonjour à toutes et à tous’) and, as the classic gamekeeper turned poacher, I remember Willy insisting politely that the Commission should share its negotiating mandates (with third countries) in a confidential manner with the EP, which turned me into a constant target. But I also remember the courtesy and the friendliness and the typically Belgian pragmatism and consensualism (if that word exists) and the constant Europeanism. Though belonging to different political families, he and the late Karel Van Miert were good examples of Belgium’s habit of producing internationally-respected statesmen. Unlike poor Karel (67), Willy died at a decent age (84), I suppose, but in both cases the world is indubitably the poorer for their passing.

When I was about eight I received, as a generous Christmas present from an aunt, an illustrated book about birds and animals. I must have paged through that book hundreds of times (it is still on my bookshelves), gazing in wonderment at the (black-and-white) photographs of all sorts of exotic species. One bird that fascinated me was the bower bird. The male of the species  builds a bower – quite a complicated stick structure – and then decorates it with various objects. As wiki puts it, ‘These objects — usually different among each species — may include hundreds of shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items, coins, nails, rifle shells, or pieces of glass.’ I thought about the bower bird as I was on my way to Zaventum airport a few weeks ago. There are roadworks in one of the tunnels leading out of the city. As our car flashed by I just had time to see that the workmen had collected up about thirty fallen hubcaps and had decorated the walls of their hut with them. They were urban bower birds!

This evening we watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972  Solaris, based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 sci fi novel of the same name. Inevitably, it concentrates more on the hallucinations and the emotional crises of the scientists (particularly the investigator, Kris Kelvin) who are its main protagonists than the almost philosophical reflections that the novelist could engage in. But it remains true to Lem’s brilliant central thesis, which is the inability of human intelligence to even comprehend, let alone communicate with, a different, extra-terrestrial form of intelligence. In their struggle to provoke some sort of reponse, the scientists resort to the characteristically human response of controlled violence and this, in turn, provokes a response that is at one and the same time beyond their comprehension and beyond their control. In the film version, Tarkovsky cleverly weaves Kelvin’s guilt about the father he leaves behind into the ending. There is resolution but, exploiting the ambiguity of reality, Tarkovsky leaves us to understand that the resolution is Solaris’s and not man’s.