Yesterday afternoon we went to a dance show in which N° 1 sprog was performing. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience with she and all her fellow dance school pupils being put through their paces to Stravinsky and more contemporary music, from Philip Glass to Bjork. But ,not for the first time, I found myself in deep admiration for the head of the dance school who had put on the whole show, from choreography through to rehearsals, for what looked like close to a hundred, if not more, pupils of all ages (up to and including adults). A journalist friend once asked me to write a piece in a series entitled ‘Angels’. The idea was to home in on the people who make our societies and our cultures tick. There are so many of these people – teachers, nurses, volunteers of all sorts – and where would we be without them and all of the hard work they put in?

20,001, 20,002....

In this morning’s Guardian newspaper I read about an extraordinary lake in South America which has started to make the headlines now because suddenly it is no longer extraordinary. I quote:  ‘Darkness rarely lasted long in the skies over Lake Maracaibo. An hour after dusk the show would begin: a lightning bolt, then another, and another, until the whole horizon flashed white. Electrical storms, product of a unique meteorological phenomenon, have lit up nights in this corner of Venezuela for thousands of years. Francis Drake abandoned a sneak attack on the city of Maracaibo in 1595 when lightning betrayed his ships to the Spanish garrison. But now the lightning has vanished. A phenomenon that once unleashed up to 20,000 bolts a night stopped in late January. Not a single bolt has been seen since… The spectacle, one of the longest single displays of continuous lightning in the world, lasts up to nine hours a night. On average it is visible over 160 nights a year and from 400km away. Lightning bolts discharged from cloud to cloud strike 16 to 40 times a minute. They can reach an intensity of 400,000 amps but are so high thunder is inaudible. There are similar phenomena in Colombia, Indonesia and Uganda but they do not last the whole night. Fishermen in the village of Congo Mirador, a collection of wooden huts on stilts at the phenomenon’s epicentre, are puzzled and anxious by its absence. “It has always been with us,” said Edin Hernandez, 62. “It guides us at night, like a lighthouse. We miss it.”‘ If you read about such a lake in a science fiction novel, you’d think it was a clever invention. But here is proof again of the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.

This has been a particularly heavy week. On two days I had back-to-back appointments, meetings and functions from eight in the morning till eight in the evening with literally not a moment to look at those e-mails or start on the files as they piled up. The other three days were scarcely less heavily charged. This evening I put on my Facebook account that I was at the end of a ‘very, very, very long week’. This is factually correct. It felt at times like swimming a length under water. At the same time, though, the week went by with extraordinary speed. The busier you are, the faster time goes, is one way of looking at it. Is there a good theory about the human relativity of time out there? What was that you said? Einstein? Oh, yes…

March o'clock and all's clear!

This afternoon my CoR counterpart, Gerhard Stahl, and I co-chaired a regular meeting of the two Secretaries-General and the Directors of what we call the ‘joint services’. Under the terms of a cooperation agreement the two Committees pool their resources to achieve economies of scale which are to the benefit of both Committees and, I always argue, an example to the other EU institutions. The purpose of these meetings is to discuss common concerns and to take those operation decisions which may have bubbled up to our level. Mostly, though, it’s our job to set the mood music and make sure that the cooperation agreement works well. Our role is not unlike that of the old night watchmen, who would tour the city at night, assuring the citizenry that all was well. Well, all is well.

Decidedly, it’s a week for sad news. Yesterday former Labour Leader and great man of letters, Michael Foot, passed away at the ripe old age of 96. I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing ‘Footie’ (as Neil affectionately called him) when I was researching my biography of Kinnock. I was warmly received at Foot’s Hampstead house and, once I’d made friends with Dizzie the dog (after Disraeli, of course), he took me up to his study and spent the best part of two hours with me. Like Napolitano, Foot was a historical figure and, indeed, when I think about it, the two have much in common; anti-fascism and great passions for parliamentarianism and literature. About half way through my interview with Foot we were talking about the SDP breakaway. ‘I had them all there – Williams, Rogers, Jenkins,’ he said, pointing animatedly to the sofa I was sitting on. It soon became clear that most of the Labour front bench over the past twenty years or more had sat on that very sofa, seeking advice, making confessions or declarations. I wonder what will happen to it now? As I said goodbye his wife, Jill, made a brief but beautiful appearance. Foot was monstrously ill-treated by the British media. He would have been a towering figure in any other century. As it was, he made an indelible impression on the political and cultural life of his country.

There’s another book in the family, I am proud to report. My better half and a poetess friend have just published Le jour aux ignorants, winner of the 2009 Prix Ex Libris: ‘Dans le creux de l’hiver/Nous verserons de la lumière/Dans les mains des mendiants/Nous poserons nos poings/Dans les mots nous mettrons/Des cailloux des journées des brindilles/Toutes choses dues.’

This morning, the Presidents of the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions jointly hosted a state visit from the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, accompanied by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Franco Frattini. The three Presidents, Napolitano, Mario Sepi and the newly-elected Mercedes Bresso, spent almost an hour together, with their discussions primarily concentrating on the consequences of the Lisbon Treaty. Napolitano is a great European as well as a great Italian and he was very much on the ball when it came to the Treaty’s provisions on such themes as the social dimension, participatory democracy and subsidiarity. My counterpart at the CoR, Gerhard Stahl, and I had privileged ringside seats in these intimate exchanges. Too soon it was all over and the sense of excitement that had temporarily convulsed the institutions subsided. Napolitano deserves a good biography. In the meantime, the wiki entry is enough to demonstrate why Napolitano is such a historic figure.

Sad news from Bologna. Adriano Baroni, the founder of the Chet Baker Jazz Club, passed away on 26 February. Before he founded the club Adriano, whom I always knew as ‘Baroni’ ran a small osteria, Della Fatica, in via Torleone, dangerously close to the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Center. As a student there back in 1979-80, I spent an awful lot of time in Della Fatica, strumming the guitar, singing and mostly, I suspect, drinking.* Baroni was like an uncle to me and his two sons, Gilberto and Marco, like cousins. It has been ages since I last saw them. In April this year my class will be gathering in Bologna to celebrate their thirtieth (I can scarcely believe it) anniversary, and I was much looking forward to looking up the old haunts and my old friends, like Baroni. Now, sadly, he has gone, but I’ll be sure to look up Marco and Gilberto and share some warm memories with them of a kind man with an extraordinarily generous attitude towards impoverished students.  * No, let’s be honest. I don’t suspect; I was!

This evening we went to the annual press review – a comedy review of the year written and performed by members of the Brussels-based press corps. The title of this year’s review was ‘Up Rompuy’ (from an old British comedy, ‘Up Pompei!’) The running theme was, of course, the new President of the European Council but he received only mild, though also very funny, treatment. A supportive cheer even went up from the crowd when somebody pretending to be him declared ‘Better to be a wet rag than an old fart!’ Those following events in the European Parliament last week will know what this refers to. Well, the number of journalists in the Brussels-based press corp may be declining but, based on this year’s review, the quality is staying.

This evening I gave a talk to a bunch of young Syracuse University students on a visit to Brussels from their Strasbourg campus. I have been giving these talks now twice a year since 1987 (see 15 October 2009 post). The curiosity and alertness of my audiences has never changed but the tenor and themes of my presentations have evolved a great deal over the past twenty-two years. In that period I and my contemporaries have had the privilege of witnessing all the ‘grand narratives’ – the avoidance of war, the end of the cold war, German unification, the single market, the single currency, enlargement – come to pass. By chance, there was an article in today’s Guardian newspaper by Timothy Garton Ash on the same theme: ‘The deepest reality underlying this crisis,’ he writes, ‘ is that the personal experiences and memories that have pushed European integration ahead for 65 years, since 1945, are losing their force. The personal memory of war, occupation, humiliation, European barbarism, fear of Germany, including Germany itself; the Soviet threat, the cold war, the ‘return to Europe’ as a gurantee of hard-won freedom, the hope of restored greatness. These were massive biographical motivators which drove people like Mitterrand and Kohl evn unto the euro. Can Europeans go on building Europe without such profound motivators? Are there new ones in sight?’  My answer to the students tonight was a determined ‘yes’. This new narrative – of consolidating the Europe we have achieved whilst exporting our successful model with more proselytism – is maybe not as attractive as all the recent history we have lived through but I am sure it can be as inspiring. As I get older, so I speak more about the duty of future generations to maintain an idealistic approach towards world affairs. The ambitions of the students sitting at my table  – including conflict resolution and fighting against child trafficking – were proof that this idealism is encouragingly alive and well.