I received a very generous present this week from a part-Slovenian colleague. It was a replica of the decorated front board of a bee hive. By chance, the next day I welcomed a new Slovenian colleague, Vlasta, a translator, to the Committee and I mentioned the present and showed it to her. She, it transpired, had worked as a translator in the Slovenian press agency during Slovenia’s accession negotiations. I had forgotten (but did I know this?) that Slovenia has its own indigenous bee variety, the Carniolan bee, which is both docile and highly productive (see here, for example). Bees and honey have traditionally played a very important role in Slovenian culture, hence the painted hive front boards. Vlasta studied mine and then told me what the images were about, and I quote (Europe, endless!  – and thank you, Guy and Vlasta!): 

The picture is called “Pegam and Lambergar” and it depicts a duel between the mythical Slovenian hero Lambergar and a foreign soldier called Pegam. (more…)

The other day I wrote a post about another of my poems, Crushed Salamander, that has recently been published in an anthology. My poet and fellow-blogger, Jeannette, very kindly proposed to post my poem on her blog, and so here it is, together with the little story that goes with it.

A friend, Kjell Torbiorn, who is the Head of Private Office to the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and a Professor at Syracuse University (see 15 October post) has the particular distinction of having been a pop star in Sweden in his youth. He wrote a number of popular hits and recorded several albums and then… And then he did several degrees and a doctorate and ended up as a high-ranking civil servant. But as Kjell gradually reaches retirement age so his previous incarnation is steadily reasserting itself. Just this week he sent me a demo recording of a song he co-wrote with two friends entitled ‘Once in a lifetime’. It’s a pretty duet and, well, I just cannot get the melody out of my head – surely a guarantee of success? In any case, they’re shortly going to record a professional demo and then try to sell their song. I am convinced you’ll be hearing it on your radios next year. You’ll know the one; the one with the melody you can’t get out of your head.

Last Saturday, with sick children languishing in the house and experiencing flu-ey symptoms myself, I decided to become all industrious in a sort-of non-laborious way, if you see what I mean. Against a wall in our garden stands a pear tree which must be at least forty years old. It is an excellent cropper. The problem is that every year some sort of parasitical (more…)

When my parents recently passed away they left behind a large number of photograph albums and an even larger number of negatives. We three brothers split the archive between ourselves, with a view to scanning and sharing everything. Recently, I have started this work with some of the older negatives, and here’s a photograph I came across. I can remember those woollen trunks. They itched and scratched and, once wet, became uncomfortably heavy and started to stretch. Also, they took ages to dry and left you feeling chilly and damp long after you’d come out of the water. I don’t look unhappy though, do I?

People are falling like flies at the moment. N° 1 sprog has definitely had THE flu and has have many of her classmates. N° 2 may have had IT and I don’t know what I have got but I am not feeling too hot. Three of my team have got IT and I see plenty of empty offices as I stroll through the corridors. We were given a graphic illustration of how bad it has got when we sent out a message to all staff. Generally, we get quite a few ‘out of office’ messages. But today we got screenloads. All this leads me to wonder if this is the worst, or if there is worse to come. For the time being, we are coping…

This afternoon I gave a welcoming address on behalf of both Committees to an organisation called Eurolib. Founded in 1997, Eurolib brings together all the libraries of the European Union’s institutions and agencies. As I told our visitors, such an organisation makes obvious good sense, since it can only lead to economies of scale and the sharing of expertise but also it allows libraries (such as ours) to specialise. I told them about one of my favourite quotations in this context: your library is your portrait. It was coined by Holbrook Jackson. When we go to people’s houses, we frequently sneak a look at their bookshelves, thus getting an idea about their tastes and enthusiasms. In the same way, an institution’s library says a lot about it. Is it up to date? Is it well-ordered? Is it specialised? Are their gaps? Both consultative committees are currently hard at work in modernising and transforming their libraries into information centres and service providers better geared to the needs of our members. So I suppose you could say that we have taken down the old portraits and are currently putting up new ones…

Like London buses, bad news tends to bunch together. This afternoon I also learnt about the death of Werner Maihofer, who passed away on 6 October. When I arrived at the European University Institute in 1981, its founding President, Max Kohnstamm, was just leaving and his successor, Werner Maihofer, was just arriving. Both were great figures in different ways. An Olympic speed-skater in his youth, Maihofer became a leading FDP intellectual in the early 1970s and took over from Hans-Dietrich Genscher as German Minister of the Interior in 1974. These were the days of the Red Army Faction and, as a leading liberal thinker, Maihofer found himself in the ironic position of reluctantly imposing a series of restrictive measures on civil liberties. In 1978 he got caught up in a phone-tapping scandal and, taking it on the chin, resigned and returned to his university chair in Bielefeld. In 1981 he was appointed President of the EUI. I was a young researcher representative and got to work closely with him on the academic and financial councils. His English remained comically poor (but was always better than my non-existent German), but we managed nevertheless to communicate sufficiently well to push through a series of measures which, collectively, ensured that researchers maintained their rightful place in the overall scheme of things. I remember him as a thoroughly decent and humane individual who was not afraid of siding with the researchers against his professorial colleagues if he felt that that was the best thing to do.

In the year below me at Johns Hopkins there was an Englishman with an infectious laugh. Jonathan Cooper was good company and a really nice guy. He is also the first person I ever met who made and lost over a million pounds – and stayed exactly the same. He held down various jobs after Bologna but in the City of London’s heyday he set up a business selling healthy sandwiches to young City traders. It was a living, but the break came when a local authority put out a call for tenders to provide sandwich lunches to its schoolchildren. Jonathan put in a bid and, much to his surprise, won the contract. One contract led to another and in a very short space of time he went from running a sandwich bar to industrial production and from earning a living to becoming a millionaire. Jonathan’s Dad ran a garage and salesroom and Jonathan had always been a sleeping partner in the business. Then his Dad fell ill and the business first foundered and then collapsed. Jonathan’s fortune disappeared as fast as it had come but Jonathan himself remained the same lovely guy with that infectious laugh. It has been years since I have seen him. We drifted out of touch. But I know we would have carried on just where we left things – laughing late into the night. But we won’t be able to do that any more. Today I received the news from Bologna that Jonathan is dead, felled by a lightning-fast cancer, leaving a wife and three kids behind and the fondest memories of that infectious laugh and endearing smile. Sometimes clichés cannot be avoided. The world is much the poorer for his departure.

My counterpart at the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, is away on mission at the moment so I got to chair the regular meeting of our two Committees’ EMAS (Eco-Management and Audit Scheme) steering committee alone. Hot on the heels of our proud achievement in winning the Ecodynamic Enterprise label (see 29 September post), we are determined to go still further in reducing our energy requirements and rendering our Committees as ‘green’ as possible. I really enjoy these meetings, since whatever we do is, without a doubt, for the better.