It’s Friday again – already. I realised that with a start earlier this morning when I picked this week’s edition of the Economist off the door mat and realised I still had last week’s, unopened and even unwrapped, in my briefcase. I just don’t know where the week went. What I do know is that this is the first morning where I haven’t had a meeting at eight or before (hence the lack of posts on this blog). My inbox is stacked high with urgencies, most of them overdue, and I am about to disappear back into meetings for the rest of the day. And outside it is, quite simply, a most beautiful day. I once had a Director who would occasionally come out with pearls of wisdom about the challenges of our bureaucratic lifes. One of his sayings comes back to mind now. ‘Sometimes, Martin,’ he said, ‘you just have to let yourself be overwhelmed.’ This little post is like the moment when you try and lift yourself out of a swimming pool by your arms, but the parapet is too high and gravity is too strong and so, plouf!, you let yourself plop back into the water. So I am back off to my meetings now. Bye-eee. (Plouf!)

Recently, my friend and fellow budding scribe, Jeannette Cook,  was profiled on normblog, because of her own excellent blog, Ceci n’est pas une cuisine and, in an act of great kindness, she cited my blog as one of her three favourites. As a result, my blog received visits from quite a few people who would otherwise never have discovered it. So now I am returning the favour. If you get a chance, visit Jeannette’s blog. It is great fun. As I told her yesterday evening, to my mind she has already won my annual prize for the funniest post title, namely: ‘Your bum looks big in that sonnet.’

David Lipsey

I am an avid Radio 4 listener. One of my favourites is The Westminster Hour late on Sunday evenings. This evening David Lipsey and Michael Meacher were discussing the Left’s fortunes. Until now, readers will have noticed, I have scrupulously avoided commenting on the recent European election results: it is too painful, in all sorts of ways. But there was an interesting phenomenon at work. With a few exceptions, the Left did badly where it might have been expected to exploit the current crisis. Meacher, a good old leftie, argued that this was because what was needed was more of the Left, not less. But Lipsey, a political scientist as well as a Labour politician, had another theory. In modern democracies, he argued, people vote right in times of economic crisis because they want firm management and left in the good times because they can afford visions of a better life. Discuss.

In the afternoon to deepest Brabant Wallon, to the birthday party of one of my God daughters. Each year at her party a minor miracle occurs. It doesn’t matter how lousy the weather might be earlier in the day; it is always sunny for her party. So it was this year: a glorious summer’s evening outside, on this, the summer solstice. But her older sister recounted fresh proof that the crisis is biting. A young teacher, trained up by her school, they preferred to let her go at the end of this academic year rather than offer her tenure, which would have brought her better terms but been more expenseive for the school. She’ll find a job elsewhere in all probability, but what has happened to her is counter-intuitive. She had been trained up precisely in order that she could then be offered tenure and become part of the school’s permanent staff and, since she was a gifted and much-appreciated teacher, the school had to let her go with a very heavy heart. Put another way; intellectual capital is being sacrificed for short-term savings and cuts in quality. It’s what we were discussing in Sofia, in fact.

To a garden party with various bigwigs in the evening. One of these brought confirmation that carving knives are seriously out in the Council’s budget committee. This is as expected and entirely as it should be. As one of the delegations stated during my grilling a few weeks ago, in such times no institution should assume, let alone expect, continued growth. The problems will come in translating the expected cuts back into practical consequences for the Committee’s political and administrative activities but, then, that’s what Secretaries-General are for…

This afternoon we went to the Petit Sablon, to the Belgian Confuscius Institute which, together with the Association Belgique-Chine, was holding its annual proclamation of results for language courses. This was a proud parents moment (N° 1 child is learning Chinese) but the former DG Education and Culture official in me was very attentive to the trends that have been becoming apparent on these annual occasions. The Chinese Ambassador, for example, is a relaxed, witty and urbane man and he judged the type of speech needed perfectly (no longer, in other words, lengthy and stern addresses). Also, there was a time, not so long ago, when the Europeans would proudly announce on such occasions that they were sending scholars off to China on fellowships, but now the boot is very much on the other foot; it is the Chinese who offer us fellowships and scholarships now. It is through such occasions, as much as anything else, that I sense the balance of economic – and cultural – power changing in the world. Martin Jacques has a book out about this shift (When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World) and what, in his opinion, the future promises. I am determined to read the book this summer. In the meantime, Jacques summarises his arguments here.

We had an hour to kill before the flight back.  It was hot, very hot – about 35°; not the best of weather for lengthy city walks. I went into a toyshop, hoping to get a local momento for the kids, but the toys were exactly the same ones I could have found back in Brussels or in London. That reminded me of another experience back in Lisbon in 1987. It was such a distinctive place then in terms of the shops and the produce and merchandise they sold, or so I thought. One day we took a ferry across the Tagus and sipped white wine on a terrace looking back across the river to the city as the sun set, and it was then that we saw outside a small supermarket the unmistakeable logo of the (Belgian) Delhaize supermarket chain. This, alas, is the inevitable downside of having an internal market. Of course, there is still room for local markets and produce but, nevertheless, simple economies of scale militate in favour of a degree of cultural harmonisation… The flight back was a privilege and a joy. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and I looked down on the spectacular site of the silvery Danube, slithering across Hungary like a massive silver snake. Later, I gazed down on Lake Balaton, looking for all the world like a highly polished tray. It was simply magnificent.

What had brought me to Sofia was a meeting of the Secretaries-General of the national Economic and Social Councils. We were meeting in Sofia because the Bulgarian Economic and Social Council had kindly volunteered to act as the presidency of the network for the whole of this year. The Secretaries-General were meeting to prepare a November conference of the Presidents of the Economic and Social Councils on the theme of labour markets and the Lisbon Strategy. On the table at our meeting were detailed contributions prepared by the national councils on the short-term measures taken to deal with the current crisis. The meeting was opened by Bulgarian ESC President Professor Lalko Dulevsky and addressed by Emilia Maslarova, the Bulgarian Minister of Labour and Social Policy, before we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. My role, representing ‘Europe’, was to facilitate cooperation and coordination. More generally, though, the Commission President increasingly looks to the European Economic and Social Committee to use its networks (its members, their organisations, the national economic and social councils), particularly in the context of the current crisis. That was, indeed, the reason why the Committee, together with the national economic and social councils, was present in the margins of the Prague Employment Summit (at the specific invitation of President Barroso).  Our own President, Mario Sepi, has made the European response to the crisis an absolute priority of his mandate and this meeting and the November conference form part of a continuum of activities aimed at generating operational responses, so I was looking for (horrid word) ‘deliverables’. Two worrying phenomena were already identified in the national contributions. The first is the risk of structural and permanent unemployment among older workers, described by one participant as the risk of a ‘lost generation’. The other is the risk of high unemployment among the young – a concern flagged up by President Barroso in a recent letter to Mario Sepi. We resolved to identify best practices and to start considering medium and longer-term strategies. By the autumn we will know whether this crisis is bottoming out or deepening. In either case, there is a lot of pain out there already  and we were strongly aware of that.

I got up early and went for my now traditional run. I ran out beyond the national stadium to the huge park behind it, then ran back in, past the university, the national assembly, the Alexander Nevski Cathedral, the Russian church and the Presidency building. In fact, by the time I got back to the hotel I had pretty much ‘done’ Sofia for the sad thing is that it was heavily bombed by the Allies during the Second World War and a lot of the old city was lost. In terms of infrastructure and atmosphere, I found it strongly reminiscent of Lisbon when I first visited it back in 1987. Then, too, the country had been an EU member state for just two years. If it holds true, the parallel is an encouraging one, for Lisbon now is a beautiful, prospering, and prosperous city. Sofia, surrounded by green mountains and luscious parks, is clearly destined for a similar future.

And so I took a late evening flight out to Sofia, capital city of Bulgaria, one of the EU’s most recent member states (it acceded in 2007). Because of the time difference it was almost midnight when I landed but, nevertheless, the Secretary General of the Bulgarian Economic and Social Council, Mr Anton Lazarov, and a colleague, Ms Hristina Vergieva, were waiting at the airport to greet me. Now that’s what I call class! It’s good, and more than a little strange, to be back in Sofia. The last time I was here was 1981 – twenty-eight years ago! In that year my girlfriend (later to be my wife) and I took the Orient Express from Venice to Istanbul. But our train was a trundling plebeian convoy, and not the luxurious version that rich train enthusiasts now take. We’d got our calculations hopelessly wrong and pretty much ran out of food by the end of the first day. The trip took three-and-a-half days and so, for the rest of the journey, we relied on what we could buy on station platforms and the charity of Turkish families returning home (in fact, they were wonderfully generous). In those days, Sofia was a confluence between two main railway lines taking Yugoslav holiday makers and Turkish gastarbeiters south. We didn’t dare leave the train for long, but I remember drab, though still elegant, buildings and the exoticism of Cyrillic script everywhere. As we rapidly realised, the ‘real’ Orient Express represented a symbiosis between a sort of travelling smuggling machine and a mobile supermarket. By the time we got to Bulgaria, the Yugoslavs had been thoroughly fleeced by so-called customs officials who paraded up and down the train accompanied by muscle-bound and thuggish enforcers. I imagine the same held pretty much true for the Turks. But in Sofia, where the two flows south joined together, the Bulgarians cheerfully added a wagon to the back of the train full of ‘duty free’ goods, ranging from stereo music centres and televisions through to cigarettes and spirits. The mood lightened. Suddenly, all the deutschmarks and dollars that had been hidden away (rolling the notes up and putting them in cigarettes, with a bit of tobacco on top, was a favourite hiding place) appeared in a frenetic spending spree. The come-uppance came when the train got to Edirne, on the Greek/Turkish frontier. We were stuck there for almost twelve hours, as customs officials went though the train systematically, enthusiastically slapping customs duties on everything our fellow travellers had bought in the added-on wagon! And now here I am again, so many years, and so much history later. I stayed up far too late reading up on Bulgaria’s tortured history and proud past. It is, truly, good to be back.