We have at last started to watch the American TV series, The Wire. Wow! Although the series won no major awards it is easy to see why many critics consider it one of the greatest series made. Already in the dense first episode the viewer is flung headlong into a gritty and all-too-believable depiction of West Baltimore’s dystopian urban sprawl. The series’ primary author, David Simon, said that he wanted to show what institutions did to individuals. In the first series there are two such institutions: the illegal drugs trade, on the one hand (and particularly that part of it dominated by the fictional Barksdale family), and the Baltimore police department on the other. The realism extends to dialect and slang, which sometimes renders the dialogue almost impenetrable – at least, on a first viewing. But it doesn’t really matter, for the sense of the characters and the relationships is perfectly conveyed and we can already see that D’Angelo “D” Barksdale has problems with his conscience – surely never a good thing for a villain.

Today I finished the third volume of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain (1998). John Grady Cole, the protagonist of the first volume, All the Pretty Horses, and Billy Parham, the protagonist of the second volume, The Crossing, are brought together as cowhands on a ranch threatened by drought and possession by the military. The atmosphere (the Old West, threatened by the new) and the landscape (the Mexican frontier) are by now familiar. In-between the horse/ranch action, the ‘boys’ visit the brothels of Ciudad Juárez and John Grady Cole, who has a sort of fascination with the afflicted, falls madly, and fatally, in love with a young prostitute, Magdelena, who is also the object of the jealous passions of her pimp, an expertly knife-wielding Eduardo. The latter has Magdelena murdered as she tries to cross into the States and the two suitors subsequently kill one another, leaving the surviving Billy to hobo on into meditative old age. For me, this was the least satisfactory of the three volumes. There are some wonderful descriptions – of a wild dog hunt, for example – but the passages are disjointed and the text is not as highly polished as usual. For example, a cooling stove ticks and a few pages later another cooling stove creaks; water is frequently beading on surfaces (glasses, windows); and lightning flickers just a little too frequently over Mexico’s distant mountains. At the very end of the book, and thus of the trilogy, Billy shelters under a bridge with another tramp, a philosophising dreamer. His observations are profound, but if this was intended as the author’s closing soliloquy I searched in vain for the binding thread. Still, the trilogy is a magnificent achievement and a fantastic read. McCarthy’s literary and geographical territory is as much his own as Graham Greene’s Greeneland.

This afternoon (with thanks and apologies to PP) I at last got around to watching Roberto Benigni’s 1991 cult classic, Johnny Stecchino. Benigni plays a sweet dupe, Dante, and a gangster-turned-grass, Johnny, whilst Benigni’s real life wife, Nicoletta Braschi, plays the gangster’s scheming wife, Maria. A series of comic riffs are derived from the plot’s central deceit – that Dante is the spitting image of Johnny. Maria schemes to have Dante, mistaken for Johnny, assassinated, so that she and Johnny can then escape to Latin America and live happily ever after – or does she? There are some great gags but, basically, this film’s all about Benigni and if you happen not to like him then this isn’t for you. For those who do, though, Benigni is in a long line of comic actors, starting with Chaplin, who can make you laugh without saying a thing. I was trying to think of a British nearest-equivalent. No, not Rowan Atkinson, whose Mr Bean creation has an unredeeming mean streak but, rather, the far more lovable Norman Wisdom and his endearing creation, Norman Pitkin. And that’s why, in the end, this film doesn’t quite work for me. Benigni has spent a whole career developing the image of the gentle, lovable, talkative clown (think Bob in Down by Law for a start) and no matter how far he deepens his voice, his depiction of the evil Johnny just isn’t plausible. Italians would probably tell me that that is precisely the point. It’s good fun, anyway.

Our Christmas Eve film was Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Tom Hanks. The film fairly faithfully follows the extraordinary but true life story of Frank Abagnale Jr who, before he was even nineteen, had earned himself millions of dollars as a confidence trickster, posing variously as an airline pilot, lawyer and doctor. He made most of his money through fake cheques and it was his skill as a forger that would both see him imprisoned and later reincarnated as a multi-millionaire adviser to the FBI and the banking sector. Di Caprio turns in a strong and utterly believable performance as a young man who, as Hanks’s detective realises, is still really a lonely boy who wanted to impress his father and bring his divorcing parents back together again. The father dies and there is no home to go back to. But the film, as the real life, nevertheless ends on an upbeat note.

For some reason, Christmas mass in a packed church, with a lot of comings-and-goings at the back, reminded me of the Christmas Eve ritual of my teens. We’d tank up in several pubs before heading out to sing carols in the estates (poor them, but the money raised went to charity), then head back to the pubs that had licences to stay open later before getting to church (the church in the picture) for midnight mass. There was a fine art to this. You had to be there before the gospel reading and stay for the eucharist. In fact, I’d head home after the end of the mass but every year there was a large contingent at the back of the church that started heading home just as soon as the priest was giving communion. One year this so incensed Father Martin that, having given a fire-and-brimstone sermon from the pulpit (as the usual suspects crept in), he strode to the back of the church and locked everybody in until he’d given the blessing at the end – strictly against fire and safety rules, of course, but there was more than a hint of Don Camillo about Father Martin. A Merry Christmas to you all.

A quick in-and-out to London for a spot of Christmas shopping (Oxford Street and Regent Street), a few galleries (some masterpieces at the National Gallery and a wonderful Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Tate Modern), lacquered duck in Chinatown (Soho), fish-and-chips in the shadow of the Globe theatre, the obligatory English breakfast and, to cap it all, a West End musical, Thriller Live. Whilst I have never been a fanatic Michael Jackson follower I have grown up admiring his music, from the Jackson Five through to the likes of Thriller and Bad.  This musical celebration of his life, with a brilliant dancing troupe and wonderful singers, convinced me that he was indeed possessed of a sort of show business genius, capable of adapting to successive musical fashions and writing and performing major hits. Above all, this show is fun. Of course, it has taken on additional significance since Jackson’s untimely death. Apart from the video recordings, this is now the closest you’ll ever get to the Michael Jackson experience. Catch it if you can!

It’s a cliché, but that’s more-or-less what I did; worked, that is, down to the wire. Having long ago perfected the art of making lists and then prioritising, I have been jogging (at times, literally) around the office and the corridors, ticking off tasks and obligations. Being British, the Christmas card ritual has been in there as well – at least for close family and friends. And it is of course a time of friendship and good cheer, so there have also been a series of most enjoyable but seriously waist-challenging midday and evening events. Then, suddenly, this evening, that was that; no more office. It is the metaphorical equivalent of the moment you dive under water. Suddenly, everything is different and, at first, a little strange. Smartphones mean that one is never entirely away from the office anymore, but that exhilarating realisation is always special.

Pierre Nouvel's clever set

This evening we went to the Kaai Theatre to see a new production, Austerlitz, derived from the W.G. Sebald novel of the same name. Conceived of by Jérome Combier, acted by Johan Leysen, with video and scenography by Pierre Nouvel, lighting by Bertrand Couderc and music by Ictus, ten years to the day after Sebald died, in a traffic accident, this production seeks to reproduce the internal atmospherics of the dark world that Austerlitz describes, and so we make the transition with Leysen’s deep, sombre voice from archives to stations to transit camps to death camps, as the narrator seeks out the parents who sent him away so that he would not suffer their fate. Powerful stuff – and timely. A reminder of where we never, ever want to go again.

This morning, after a short and entirely constructive meeting, the EESC’s management board approved a new, four-year development plan. Thanks to a magician in my private office, Bernard T, the plan is genuinely the product of a grass roots exercise, generated through consultation with line managers, and has also been carefully articulated with the political authorities of the house. Why a plan? Put simply, we must think systematically about the future and plan accordingly. We know that collectively we have to face up to a number of challenges and we have to anticipate them, particularly from the resource-planning point of view. Thanks to the sterling work of Bernard T, we now have a set of objectives and actions, with lead services and targets clearly identified. In other words, we have equipped ourselves with an excellent management tool.

EESC President Staffan Nilsson opens the meeting

This morning I attended the opening session of a meeting held on the EESC’s premises of Lewiatan, the Polish Confederation of Private Employers, on the theme of ‘A Day of Social Dialogue’. In her opening address, Henryka Bochniarz, President of Lewiatan, underlined the importance of social dialogue to all stakeholders, including employers, and insisted that the primary challenge is to ensure the future of social dialogue since it is the best guarantor of a structured return to growth and prosperity.