As if to seal my bardic status (don’t take this seriously), I have had another poem published in an anthology. Coo! Soon I’ll be able to retire and live off of the proceeds. More seriously, yesterday evening I had to go back to the recording studios to record the title of my West Malling Poem, What Hope Saw. It’s just three words but, I promise you, once you start thinking about stress and intonation there seem to be endless possibilities. My admiration for those who read poetry and prose seriously has gone up immensely. In my ignorance, I thought I could just read through the poem and push off back home but, no, the stanzas and the title were recorded separately and several times over and this simple fact meant that I had to think carefully about the follow-ons (for example)…

Otto and Franz Josef

We had very near and dear friends to lunch yesterday. He has Russian roots. She is half-American, half-Belgian.  And both their families are far-flung and cosmopolitan. At one stage the conversation got onto historical connections. I told them about an article I had just read, co-authored by a young Hungarian working in my secretariat, Zoltan Krasznai. (‘The Christ of Limpias and the Passion of Hungary’, William A. Christian Jr. and Zoltan Krasznai, History and Anthropology, Vol. 20, N° 3, September 2009, pp. 219-242.) The article recounts the strange way in which the residence of the exiled Hungarian royal family in the Basque village of Lekeitio in the early 1920s sharpened the interest of Hungarian monarchists in the apparitions of the Christ of Limpias in nearby Cantabria. The monarchists interpreted the alleged movements of the Christ as sympathetic suffering for the dismemberment of the Hungarian nation by the Allied powers in the Treaty of Trianon; the Passion and Crucifixion of Hungary becoming the dominant nationalist metaphor in the interwar years (you can still find objets in Budapest bric-a-brac shops). Zita Bourbon-Palma, the Italian widow of Charles (crowned King of Hungary in 1916, died of pneumonia on Madeira, 1922) installed herself with her six children in a draughty villa in Lekeitio. One of those children was Otto von Hapsburg or, to give him his full name, Archduke Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius of Austria. I knew this Otto, this living link (and still living) with Charlemagne who, from 1979 to 1999, served as a Member of the European Parliament. By then he was a gentleman supporter of the European ideal and it was fascinating to read about this particular aspect of his childhood and to realise just how much history he had lived. The lunchtime topic now became monarchy/aristocrats who had known one life, lost everything and had to adapt to another. Immediately, the name of Vladimir Nabokov came up (see previous posts about Speak, Memory). Here, there was a Belgian connection, both with regard to his parents’ exile at one stage and to his brother Kirill Vladimirovich Nabokov, who studied at Leuven and later managed a travel agency in Brussels (he was also a poet and journalist). Oh, said our Belgian-American friend, I knew him very well. He and his wife were, it transpired, friends of her parents. She had even stayed at his flat as a kid. Beat that! Postscript (20 October): within minutes of me posting this entry a colleague wrote to inform me that she had commuted for three years with one of Kirill’s daughters and that they had become good friends…

I recorded ‘What Hope Saw’ in a studio this morning for, yes, the poem and Nigel Clarke’s composition are going to be issued as a CD! Watch this space. As to the reading, this was a very interesting experience for me. The way I parsed the poem to read it was very different from the way I had written it. Also, because there were several takes and the stanzas were recorded separately, I had to think carefully about intonation and about whether, for example, I wished to finish a stanza on an upbeat or a downbeat. It was one of those miniature revelations that make you realise that there is much more to it than you would realise when, for example, you listen to Poetry Please on Radio 4…

This 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.

This evening I gave a talk to a great bunch of young Syracuse students. I told them, truthfully, that I have been giving such talks for a long time now, but that the ‘narrative’ of my talk has changed over time. If you talk to young people today about the avoidance of war or the maintenance of peace, they will of course recognise this as a noble end, but it no longer resonates in the way it once did. Real experience of war between most European countries is, thankfully, far away. But, then, if you seek to aspire, what might be the new narrative? I increasingly believe that we should start to return to the aspirations of the first federalists, who believed in world, rather than European, federation. It’s not going to happen on a world scale in the foreseeable future, but regional groupings are already evolving, many of them modelled on the European experience. Increasingly, humans face global challenges. What better than to evolve towards global mechanisms for global solutions?

One of her many successes

From the Cooperation Agreement I hotfooted it to the farewell drinks party for the Austrian lady, Antonia Kuehnel, who has until now been in charge of the Committee’s cultural activities. She is what is termed a ‘detached national expert’, seconded to us by her own national civil service and, sadly, it is now time for her to return to Vienna. Antonia has been the perfect colleague. Almost single-handedly, she has irrigated our corridors, meeting rooms and larger spaces with beauty and innovation; she has brought literary lunches to our terrace, she has brought striking images to our walls and she has made the Committee a better place to be for its members and its staff. Her colleagues in the communication department made a DVD for her to take back with her, and all of those who have worked with her, including me, were interviewed and spliced into the film. It’s a lovely way to pay tribute to a lovely person.

I spent most of this afternoon, together with my counterpart at the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, in a joint meeting with the Directors and Deputy Directors of our so-called ‘Joint Services’. These meetings are regular occurrences and an obligation under the Cooperation Agreement that both Committees signed in order effectively to govern their pooled resources. So ,we discussed our joint budgetary policy, business continuity, a strategy for the maintenance and renovation of our buildings, personnel policy (our flexitime pilot project is going rather well) and preparations for the political-level meeting, the Political Monitoring Group, that caps our cooperation and provides political guidance. Inevitably, the meetings are a long slog, but the atmosphere is excellent and I persist in believing that our two Committees are setting an example to the other institutions.

John Monks

Yesterday evening I attended the John Fitzmaurice Memorial Lecture and listened to the wise words of John Monks, General Secretary of the European Trades Union Confederation. John concentrated his analysis mainly on the way British policy towards European integration was likely to evolve next year (you all know what I mean!). The UK is in a paradoxical situation. Sterling is not in the euro, for example, but some 60% of employees in UK PLCs work for foreign-owned companies. ‘The soggy case for Europe gets nowhere,’ he argued; ‘it’s got to be muscular.’ In effect, he was implying that British pro-Europeans should be preparing for a referendum even if there will not be one.  Following on from the Lisbon II referendum result in Ireland, I have met a number of exhilarated Irish colleagues who took time off to go back and fight the good fight. I would relish the prospect. On Europe, the devil definitely does not have all the best tunes. I met a Tory businesswoman in West Malling, for example, who was solidly pro-single currency because she was losing out to transaction costs and exchange rate uncertainties. We should all start limbering up!

I heard back from the Mayor, Sue Murray, this morning. My poem is on her blog. More to the point, the musical evening raised £ 1,000 each for the Pilsdon at Malling Community and Spadework. This is wonderful news and I am happy to have been a part of such a wonderful occasion.

The late, great Bill Shankly was once asked if football was a matter of life or death for him. He famously replied that ‘it is more important than that’. Well, there has been much in this morning’s news about a football match to take place this evening between Armenia and Turkey in the old Ottoman capital of Bursa. The Turks are determined to lavish hospitality on their visitors and both countries wish to use the match for – entirely laudable – diplomatic purposes. I hope the local fans share their aims. Anyway, I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that one football match triggered a war that left over 6,000 people dead. It was a 1969 World Cup Qualifier between El Salvador and Honduras. Hours after the match, this morning’s Financial Times tells me, the borders between the two countries were closed, the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa was attacked by fighter aircraft and the two countries fought a 100-hour war. I doubt whether this was quite what Shankly had in mind, but it does make you think…