On the evening of 3 August 1914 Edward Grey, then the British Foreign Secretary, stood at the window of his office in the Foreign Office. Below, a lamplighter was lighting the street lamps in Whitehall. Grey had earlier made a long speech in the House of Commons and had then helped the Prime Minister to draft an ultimatum about what would happen if Belgium were to be invaded. Grey turned to a friend and said ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.’  There is a passage somewhere in Jean Monnet’s Memoirs where he recalls, as first President of the European Coal and Steel Community, watching the lights going out as Luxemburgers went to bed early, little realising the momentous European future that Monnet and his fellow revolutionaries were building, working late into the night. There is a surreal sense of calm in Brussels at the moment. The beautiful weather adds to a sense that all must be well. The crowds of young things spill out onto the pavement outside Kitty O’Shea’s and the bars on the Place Luxembourg bustle as they always do. And yet the helicopter hovering over the Justus Lipsius building tells a different story. When it comes to matters European, I remain an incurable optimist. As Monnet put it himself, the future Europe will be the sum of its responses to crises.

We headed to the cinema this afternoon in some trepidation to see Stephen Spielberg’s film version of Hergé’s Tintin. The trepidation was because the Tintin series of cartoon books is such a classic that anybody, let alone Hollywood, is bound to mess it up and disappoint – or so we thought. But we were wrong.   The script cleverly combines three different stories (The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure), to produce a rollicking adventure movie which somehow maintains all of the innocence and wholesomeness of the originals. We saw it in French, in 3-D, and I think that, as with Avatar, you do need the 3-D version to do full justice to the techical wizardry. The film is already a box-office success, apparently, and that is good news because it will introduce a wider and younger audience to the delights of Tintin and Milou.

Who would have thought it? France were beaten twice in their rugby world cup pool, once by New Zealand and once, humiliatingly, by Tonga. Then they beat a lacklustre England to go through to the semi-final, where they won against a fourteen-man Wales by just one point. Improbable finalists, they headed to Eden Park as underdogs and favourites to lose by a large margin to the hosts, the All Blacks, who had already beaten them 37-17 in their pool match. But one of the most distinctive aspects of the French rugby team is their romantically mercurial nature. You simply never know which France is going to turn up on the day. Today, France played their hearts out and were just one agonising point away from an extraordinary upset. In the end, they lost 8-9, the difference down to a try conversion against a penalty. French captain and try-scorer Thierry Dusautoir summed it up afterwards; “We have been criticised, but today we were strong and we showed that rugby is not just skills… it is also mental,” he said, adding with a smile, “although perhaps today we needed more skills”. He continued: “Tonight, everybody was nervous… them and us. There were 30 guys on the pitch and I think they were all scared. “We rode our luck as best we could but we failed by one point.” The way France started to dominate in the second half was a wonderful illustration of what can be done in sport when self-belief is strong. All-in-all, this has been a very entertaining world cup, with some great rugby on show. Now normal sleep patterns may be resumed.

Not for the first time, somebody tried to kill me this evening. It was about eight-fifteen. I was on my bike in the rue Belliard and about to cross the road at the pedestrian crossing above the railway bridge. Faithful readers of this blog may remember that already in February 2009 we met with the then transport minister Pascal Smet to point out the dangers to pedestrians lurking in this road. To his credit, the lights at this particular pedestrian crossing were made automatic, rather than on request, but the way in which this light was synchronised has effectively created a new problem. Traffic turning out of the rue de Trèves has a few seconds before the bridge light turns red. The temptation for the first cars out is therefore to accelerate in a bid to beat the lights. For those less scrupulous, the lights can be ‘burnt’, with pedestrians (if there are any at such an hour) intimidated to stay on the pavement. Hence I found myself on the crossing, on my bike, with the little green man already beckoning me across. A taxi driver, late out of the rue de Trèves, had accelerated to beat the lights and failed. Clearly, my existence irritated him. So instead of braking he continued to accelerate and aimed his car at me. If I had not accelerated or if my chain had jumped the gears he would undoubtedly have murdered me. As it was, I reached the high kerb and turned my bike sideways on. As he passed, he shouted a curse out of the passenger window. He was going too fast (he disappeared into the Belliard tunnel) for me to read his number plate. I pedalled home in subdued mood.

This evening we went to the Sportspaleis in Antwerp to watch a spritely, dapper, septuagenarian bark, shout and croak at a stadium full of people. Yes, we went to see the master, Bob Dylan, who is in the middle of a punishing European tour. The schedule would be exhausting for somebody half his age. It has already taken a grievous toll on what remains of his voice – hence the barking. We were treated to a number of classics (including A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, All Along the Watchtower and Like a Rolling Stone), inevitably leaving us sad that he couldn’t have played all the other classics. And this was a resolutely electronic affair, with Dylan only occasionally picking up an electric guitar but mostly confining himself to an electric organ and a harmonica, with the slick backing band going through its amplified paces. Unlike the first act, an on-song Mark Knopfler, there was no sign of an acoustic guitar, let alone any finger picking. We left happy (we had seen the man!) but slightly subdued. Such is Dylan’s fame that he can fill 17,000-seater sports stadiums, but that means serious amplification. And such is the state of Dylan’s voice that he simply cannot sing the ballads as he had once intended them to be sung. To his credit, Dylan eschewed backing singers, but the pragmatic result was that virtually every song he played had been re-arranged as a rock-and-roll number (Forgetful Heart was an honourable exception). This was a shame for somebody who had always wanted to go beyond rock-and-roll. Still, this living legend is still very much alive.

Krzysztof Penderecki

To the Bozar this evening to listen to Julian Rachlin interpreting Krzysztof Penderecki‘s second Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, accompanied by the Sinfonia Varsovia and then Beethoven’s seventh symphony, played by the same orchestra, and both under the venerable (78!) baton of none other than Penderecki himself. A little like William Golding in the literary context, Penderecki’s reputation among the general public outside of his native Poland probably remains chiefly down to an early, if innovatory, work (Lord of the Flies, in Golding’s case and Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima in Penderecki’s case). The chilling Threnody (you can hear it here) has been used in several films, most notably and effectively in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Tonight’s music demonstrated that Penderecki has long since moved on to richer and vaster canvases; in this case an elegiac, lyrical symphony of a single movement. You could see the musicians’ body language as they subsequently relaxed into the ubiquitously familiar territory of Beethoven.

This evening we watched Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home. The more Dylanesque will guess that this was in preparation for a forthcoming event. The young Bob Dylan who comes across in his own words and those of his contemporaries was a baby-faced vacuum cleaner, able to analyse and memorise a song in one sitting in a record store booth. He sucked up influences and inflections and produced not only great and memorable melodies but also great and memorable lyrics. His role and influence in the early 1960s is well summed up by a contemporary, Mavis Staples: ‘He was writing inspirational songs. They would inspire. He was writing truth.’ At the end, though, the viewer is left little the wiser about what really makes Robert Zimmerman tick. The old footage in the film includes his ‘notorious’ 1966 concert at Manchester Free Trade Hall, where an angry and frustrated fan shouted ‘Judas!’ because he had gone electric. In Newport in 1965 Dylan had stomped moodily off stage after similar reactions but the Manchester Dylan merely shrugs and gets on with the show.

A good friend kindly gave me an unexpected gift a week ago (thank you, A!), a book entitled Bargaining with the Devil. The subtitle is ‘when to negotiate, when to fight’. It is an interesting analysis. The author, Robert Mnookin, takes a number of case studies (among them Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela), before drawing a set of, well, pragmatic conclusions. The first are implicit: don’t jump to conclusions and don’t act impulsively. That means you will give yourself the time to think things through dispassionately, comparing the expected costs and benefits of different courses of action. Further to help in that direction you should take advice whilst undertaking your analysis. Have a ‘presumption in favour of negotiation’ but make it rebuttable. Last but not least, when you are deciding on behalf of others, ‘don’t allow your own moral intuitions to override a pragmatic assessment’. Mnookin does not say that you should always negotiate with the Devil. He doesn’t even tell you when you might. But the book does help you understand why you might decide that you should.

 Tonight we watched the 2002 film, The Quiet American. It is pretty faithful to Graham Greene’s original novel in its essentials. What Greene described so cleverly was the beginnings of the covert American involvement that would lead ultimately to the Vietnam War, a hideous conflict that would, as we now know all too well, leave deep scars as much in the psyche of the United States as in that of the Vietnamese. I last read Greene’s novel again whilst in Vietnam. Being there, it didn’t take much imagination to see that this was a war the Americans could never ultimately win, and Greene’s novel, through the metaphor of Phuong, hints perceptively at this. Its people are beautiful, graceful, and completely inscrutable and unknowable. If one adds in the impenetrability of the languages, it is really not so surprising  that American soldiers could never be at their ease, an unease well captured in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, with all of its potentially hideous consequences. Now, the war cemetries in countless Vietnamese villages recall the First and Second World War cemeteries in Europe. There is a thankful sense of distance, of healing time. Though Greene’s anti-war message was clear (and earned him the undying suspicion of American intelligence services thereafter) the fatalistic moral of his novel seemed to be that we should be wary both of cynicism and of idealism but also of the innocence of Phuong.

I sneaked out of the office this evening for an hour and went to Scotland House for the launch of the third edition of Justin Greenwood’s Interest Representation in the European Union. As a former Professor at the College of Europe, I still see the author as a colleague, but I did not only go to the launch for academic reasons. In professional terms, what Justin and his guest speaker, European Commission Vice-President Marius Sefcovic, had to say was of great interest to me, particularly in the unfamiliar use of terms, such as ‘participatory democracy’, with which I am perhaps over-familiar. Justin, for example, spoke about the evolution from ‘lobbying’ to ‘participatory democracy’, with ‘representational organisations as democratisation agents’, a ‘ teeming population playing the game of checks and balances’. His vision was of ‘participatory democracy based upon interest organisations’. This different perspective – mine, for obvious reasons, is habitually institutional and structural – was a welcome reminder that there are others out there who are also trying to flesh out the somewhat amorphous concept of participatory democracy as it ultimately emerged in the Lisbon Treaty. Sefocvic, meanwhile, put great emphasis on the transparency initiative. Concurring with him, Justin pointed out that the simple change in nomenclature, from the vaguely commercial ‘interest representation’ to the more positively normative ‘transparency’, had in itself done much to change the culture of representation and lobbying in Brussels.