EPThis morning I attended another meeting of Secretaries-General. This time it was the SGs of all the EU institutions. The meeting was hosted by the European Parliament and its SG, Klaus Welle. The SGs of the three main institutions see a lot of each other in bilateral and/or trilateral meetings, but these occasional meetings enable the heads of the administrations of all of the institutions to discuss common problems. What we discussed remains between us (though you can probably guess some of the themes). During the meeting I had a sense of déjà vu. It was the paintings on the walls in the meeting room. I sensed I had seen them somewhere else. And then I remembered. They used to hang on the wall of the Parliament’s old building in the rue Belliard, the building now occupied by … the European Economic and Social Committee. For a long time I worked in the Commission’s Secretariat General, following parliamentary affairs, and I spent an awful lot of time in the building in those good old days. Seeing the paintings again was like seeing long lost friends. We had a working lunch in a room from which we gazed down on the European Quarter and the old/new Belliard building. It was a sort of metaphor for how far the Parliament has come.