In the evening I set off for the airport for a flight to Sofia. We knew about the Belgian farmers’ protest, of course, and so I gave myself plenty of time. It was just as well. The farmers’ tactics were brilliantly planned. Through judicious parking of their tractors they managed to bring a whole swathe of the city’s motorways and main thoroughfares to a complete halt. Brilliant they were, but not as brilliant as my driver! Somehow, zig-zagging down leafy lanes in Woluwe St Pierre, Kraainem and Zaventum, he managed to get me to the airport with time to spare.

This lunchtime I faced an interesting challenge. I had been invited by the Belgium Oxford Society and its Cambridge University counterpart to give a lecture at the Belgian Fondation Universitaire. My chosen topic was, again, ‘ fleshing out the Lisbon Treaty’s provisions on participatory democracy’ and, as my long-suffering family can attest, I spent all of yesterday evening drafting a forty-five minute speech and preparing the inevitable Powerpoint presentation to accompany it. But at ten this morning I was informed that I would be expected to talk for no more than fifteen to twenty minutes, maximum. As I told my audience, it was a case not so much of rising to the occasion as shrinking to it! In the event, it all went very well. My basic thesis is that representative democracy is a necessary but insufficient condition for democracy in the EU, and that this is recognised in the Lisbon Treaty (and its predecessors) by provision for the ‘flanking’ concepts of participatory democracy and also a smidgeon of direct democracy (the so-called ‘citizens’ initiative’). The audience were lively and I fielded a large number of excellent questions. At the end I think we were all agreed that modern democracy is a far more complex phenomenon than it was in the good old days of parliamentary democracy in deferential and class-based societies. I think we were also agreed that, as learned individuals living and working in ‘Europe’, we are all part of the solution, by which I mean that to the extent that we recognise the necessity for ‘Europe’ we should seek to overcome prejudices based, broadly, on ignorance. We need an informed debate – not an uninformed one.

I spent the whole day in interviews again and, again, I marvelled at the commitment of the three EESC members who were sitting on the panel with me and my colleagues (see 12 June post). With a bit of luck, I should be able to go to the 14 July meeting of the EESC Bureau with proposals for three directors’ positions, including the heavyweight two I am currently filling on an ‘acting’ basis – finance and human resources. Soon, too, the next step in the gradual implementation of the new establishment plan – the creation of two deputy Secretaries General – should take place. I will then find myself able to delegate on a serious basis and to start clearing my desk for more strategic work. This process will have taken almost a year, but I will consider it time well spent if we manage – as is currently the case – to do all of this without imparting a sense of upheaval. When it is completed the implementation of the new establishment plan will have been a quiet and gentle revolution.

En garde!

This afternoon the President and I gave out medals and certificates to EESC officials having served 40, 30 or 20 years in the Committee and/or in the EU institutions. These are almost family occasions, with a festive atmosphere. I have prepared notes on each of the recipients, full of affectionate detail,  and, as I said in my opening words, I truly enjoy these occasions because I found out about the wonderful hinterland of our officials. On this occasion I was not disappointed. There were amateur thespians and gastronomes and hunters and a colleague who has recently ridden his bicycle around Cuba, Argentina, India and Japan (including pedalling to the top of Mount Fuji to see the sun rise). But the colleague who caught my eye was a Danish lady who is a former Olympic fencer – and is still very good at it. Keep it up, Annie!

To cap off an enjoyably active weekend, I managed to finish Marcus Sedgwick’s The Book of Dead Days in the Eurostar on the way back. In fact, there’s a good probability that I’ll end up reading all of Sedgwick’s output, since I got all of his books for my son and promised to read each of them if he did. Dark, occult happenings are Sedgwick’s specialisation, but this one has the added interest (for this would-be writer) of taking place in an imaginary world. I used to think that it was easier to write about imaginary worlds, but the more I read of this sort of book (for some reason it reminds me of Jim Crace’s Arcadia) the more I realise just how difficult it is to pull off. When we set imaginary events and characters in a real world and a real period, we at least have a basic framework in which to place them.  But in an imaginary world you have to create everything and it has to be done in a convincing way.

The National Gallery is just across Trafalgar Square and so was an obligatory port of call this morning. Once again, though, we decided on a targeted approach; we would, we declared, visit just one picture per period. This was a tough call. We ended up with Uccello (St George), van Eyck (the Arnolfini portrait), Holbein (The Ambassadors), Michelangelo (The Entombment), Velazquez (The Rokeby Venus), Stubbs (Whistlejacket – obligatory after War Horse the previous evening), Turner (The Fighting Temeraire), Seurat (The Bathers) and Van Gogh (Sunflowers).  What a collection!

This morning I got up early and went for a run alongside the Thames. I went down Whitehall to Westminster, over the Thames, back up the other side to the Tate Modern, where I crossed back over on the Millenium Bridge and came back down the Embankment to Northumberland Avenue and Trafalgar Square. The weather was beautiful. The river was beautiful. And the city, not still quite awake, was beautiful.  Not for the first time, I found myself saying ‘this is what Brussels lacks; a river’.

Then, in the evening, we went to see what had, in effect brought us to London; Nick Stafford’s brilliant adaptation for the stage of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. The original production, at the National Theatre, seemed to have sold out before tickets even went on sale and it has taken until now for me to get hold of tickets for the West End version. We were not disappointed. It is the most extraordinary piece of theatre and artistry. Without giving too much away, the horses are played by life-size puppets, worked by no less than three puppeteers. But somehow the eye doesn’t see the puppeteers, though they are hard to miss. It is brilliantly done. The story is set around the devastation of the First World War. One statistic illustrates the basic plot line; over one million horses were taken to France from Britain during the war and only 62,000 were brought back. If you get a chance to see this, please go. It is worth a trip to London in itself.

Another Cleopatra

In the afternoon we went to the British Museum, another haunt of my childhood. There used to be a magic shop (run by Neville Maskeleyne’s descendants, I believe) on the other side of the road, and after I’d scared myself visiting the mummies in the museum, I’d cross over and spend my pocket money in the magic shop. Now the museum has been spruced up wonderfully. Of course, like all great museums it would be possible to spend days in there, but with limited time at our disposal we targeted our visit on three objects/displays: the Rosetta Stone; the Elgin Marbles; and the mummies (natch). The Rosetta Stone is disappointingly displayed in a glass cabinet in the middle of a very large room full of Egyptian and Assyrian objects. How much more eloquently it would speak to us of its enigmatic past if it had a darkened and subdued room to itself! Coincidentally, the Elgin Marbles were in today’s newspapers, since the wonderful new museum at the foot of the Acropolis built to house them is now complete and there is talk about ‘loans’. And in the middle of the mummies we bumped into Cleopatra. For a moment we thought it might be the Cleopatra; you know, the one with the big nose. But in fact our Cleopatra was the daughter of an important official at Thebes at the time of the Emperor Trajan (AD 98-117) who died some 150 years after the Cleopatra. You can read about her here. In any case, it gave me the chance to bore the children by reciting one of the two greatest lines (in my opinion) about beautiful women and their effects. It comes from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra (which I studied for O level) and goes like this: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/ Her infinite variety: other women cloy/ The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry/ Where most she satisfies.’ The other greatest line, by the way, is from Christopher Marlowe, in Doctor Faustus, describing a vision of Helen of Troy: ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’

Later in the afternoon, as we crossed into Trafalgar Square, we were treated to the interesting and amusing sight of hundreds of nude cyclists pedalling down the Haymarket from Piccadilly Circus past us and down Whitehall. I don’t think I need say anything more!