Last week elections took place for the EESC’s staff committee. I am very happy to see that workplace democracy in the Committee is in excellent health; 546 of the 758 eligible voters voted – that’s a participation rate of 72 per cent. According to an ancient Presidential decision (from the 1970s), it falls to the Secretary General to convene the first meeting of the staff committee after the elections. So this morning the new committee was duly convoked and, after a short congratulatory address from yours truly, got down to its work. Staff representation is foreseen in the staff regulations that govern all of the EU institutions but even if it wasn’t an obligation I would want the Committee to exist. As the regulations put it, such staff committees ‘contribute to the smooth running of the service’ and that is exactly how I see it. The high turnout rate gives the committee legitimacy and authority in voicing staff concerns and I am much looking forward to working constructively with it and its members.

The extraordinary rescue operation to free 33 trapped Chilean miners is over, to scenes of much rejoicing. The images of the Phoenix escape capsule, as it was repeatedly gobbled up by the earth and spat out 700 metres above, disgorging its precious human cargo, were fascinating and I snatched several glimpses during the day (the whole operation was broadcast live on the BBC’s website). I await with impatience the film that will surely be made of the whole affair. Nothing needs to be invented. The desperate search for work that brought many of the men to the mine in the middle of a desert. The miners’ fears about the ‘weeping’ walls. The collapse itself. The survivors’ seventeen grim days alone with limited rations and a solemn conviction that they were going to die. The rescuers’ determined efforts. The discovery. The drilling and all of the technical challenges. The first communications. The colourful characters and leadership  – not least of Luis Urzua, ‘Don Lucho’, the shift manager – above and below ground. Camp Hope. The media scrum. The mounting patriotism. The breakthrough with the rescue tunnel. The rescue itself. The wit and wisdom of the emerging survivors and their very different reactions. And I will happily pay to see this film, safe in the knowledge that during their record-breaking imprisonment so deep in the ground, the thirty-three men already agreed that they would share all proceeds from their experience equally.

The information days for our new members are now over and I think I can describe the event without exaggeration as a great success and a great experience. There was a lovely atmosphere that reminded me a little bit of freshers’ days at university. I was delighted three times over. In the first place, it was clear that our new members very much appreciated the welcome we gave them. Most of them have now got all of the inevitable but irksome bureaucratic formalities out of the way and can come back to the constitutive plenary session next week with their minds at rest. In the second place, I could see that our staff really enjoyed themselves. Last and not least, all of the time and effort that so many colleagues had invested in the operation paid off in style. I am proud of them. Our secretariat may be small (smaller than virtually all Commissions Directorates-General, for example), but its professionalism and its excellence shone brightly through over the past two days.

Genius on stage

This evening, in a perfect antidote to a busy day, I took N° 1 sprog to see a living legend at the Ancienne Belgique; Jeff Beck. He did not disappoint. A basically modest man and a notorious perfectionist, Beck lets his guitar do the talking, and how! A generous set saw him perform a number of his rock-and-roll classics from the past decade, together with more lyrical numbers from recent albums (his encore was Nessun Dorma). He had an excellent backing team on stage with him. We particularly enjoyed bass player Rhonda Smith’s performance (see also here) – she is clearly destined for greater things – but drummer Narada Michael Walden and keyboard player Jason Rebello were also excellent. Among trade mark numbers, we got A Day in the Life, and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. My only regret is that he didn’t play my all time favourite – Nadia. Eric Clapton once explained that Beck’s genius is, more than many guitarists’, in his fingers; he long ago abandoned plectrums and picking and you can indeed see him caressing the strings with his thumb and fingers, toying with the harmonics and wooing distinctive sounds out of the instrument. Nadia is all slide and vibrato bar but the man also has fingers of steel in his left hand. Beck can sign off this post, with his haunting Corpus Christi from his latest album, Emotion and Commotion.

Presenting the team

Today was a very big day for the Committee and for its administration. As I have described in previous posts, next week will see the constitutive plenary session of the 2010-2015 mandate, and no less than 102 of the Committee’s full complement of 344 members – almost one third - will be brand new. Today and tomorrow we are welcoming these new members to what we have dubbed ‘information days’, designed variously to: enable them to get all of the bureaucratic formalities out of the way (insurance, security passes, lockers, etc) in a ‘one stop shop’; to help them to understand how the Committee functions and to explain about their rights and prerogatives; to explain a series of practical matters, from the layout of our buildings to how the voting machines work; to meet sitting members; and to meet the administration. This afternoon I chaired two information sessions (two so that we could cover all of the different languages in interpretation) and presented the future President, Staffan Nilsson, and then the members of the Committee’s management board. Everything went swimmingly and there was a positive buzz about the whole day. As I never cease repeating, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and I was proud of my colleagues for I think we amply demonstrated a simple truth; we are very much looking forward to working with our new members, just as we are much looking forward to getting our ‘old’ members back next week!

Just over seven years ago my good friend, mentor, colleague, political buddy and academic sparring partner, John Fitzmaurice, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. A memorial lecture was established in his memory and this year I received the great honour and privilege of being invited to deliver the lecture. It was supposed to take place this coming Wednesday. I wanted to have something to say, rather than having to say something, and I wanted it to be relevant to John’s memory as well as being relevant to the audience in front of me (which would in any case have had many of John’s former friends and colleagues among it). In other words, I did not want to wing it on the basis of a few ideas, but rather to develop a sustained argument and to deliver it with some passion. So I have not only been working hard but I have been feeling increasingly strongly about the things I wanted to say. Put another way, I have been building up to the big moment. But yesterday afternoon, quite suddenly, the big moment had to be postponed; the venue is no longer available. It is a novel and strange experience. In part, it feels like a postponed exam or interview (I always approach such events with what I like to believe is a healthy degree of trepidation), in part, there is a sense of frustration. But  now there is all this passion in me and there is nowhere for it to go in the near future (the lecture will probably not now take place until January).  I suppose it will just have to leak away slowly. It’s a strange feeling.

Today was the 8th World Day against capital punishment. In two-thirds of the world’s countries the practice has either been abolished or abandoned. Among European countries, only Belarus still has the death penalty. Of the 58 countries that continue to authorise the death penalty, 18 are known to have carried out executions in 2009. Sadly, those countries include the United States. On this issue, I believe, Europe can, and does, set an example for the rest of the world, whether ’Europe’ means the European Union or the broader grouping of the Council of Europe. All too often the existence of the death penalty is accompanied by an asbence of procedural guarantees. As the EU High Representative, Cathy Ashton, put it, ‘There is no room for complacency – every execution is one too many.’

At my writers’ workshop last Monday I read out a piece (cut-and-pasted below) about a David Bowie cover version of the song Wild is the Wind. As Clive James wrote in North Face of Soho (see this post: http://www.martinwestlake.eu/north-face-of-soho/), ‘The dizzy speed with which the echo of a sense memory kills time continues to astound me.’  My piece was about how, if I closed my eyes, Bowie’s 1976 recording of the song still immediately transported me back into a South Harrow living room. But I realised in retrospect that it was also about the metamorphosis of a song (written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington) through three incarnations, from the 1957 original (performed by Johnny Mathis), to Nina Simone’s sultry 1968 version, to David Bowie’s sublime (to my mind) 1976 rendition. All three versions are good in their own way. There have been other covers (including some notably crappy ones) but, as I wrote to a friend, for me Simone’s and Bowie’s transformations of the sunny fifties ballad into something so much more lyrical and, well, wild are good examples of their genius (if that’s not too strong a word). In any case, I have decided to post my exercise below and you can listen to the three versions to which I refer on You Tube:

Today has been a spectacularly beautiful day. This afternoon I drove down to Furfooz, on the Lesse river, to join a group of Michel Claes’s friends and family (see this post). As an instructor, Michel and his colleagues brought their charges, young people from troubled backgrounds, to a gite here, where they would holiday with walks, canoeing and rock climbing. As a top notch rock climber and mountaineer, Michel would wind down by scaling the nearby cliffs, overlooking a large oxbow loop in the Lesse. So we walked through the woods to the Aiguilles de Chaloux, shuffled out to the rocky promontory you can see in the picture, and talked about Michel and his life. It was almost as though he was working his way up from below and we were waiting for him to appear over the cliff edge…

This evening we watched The Swimmer (starring Burt Lancaster). It’s one of those off-the-beaten-track cinematic gems, like The Hustler (starring Paul Newman), Jeremiah Johnson (starring Robert Redford) or Little Big Man (starring Dustin Hoffman) that attract a quiet cult following and really ought to be better known. Based on a short story by John Cheever - but much better than it, the plot’s basic conceit is the metaphorical swim by an apparently popular and successful advertising agent, Ned Merrill (Lancaster), across an affluent corner of Connecticut, from swimming pool to swimming pool. It is an allegorical tale, replete with metaphors. As the middle-ageing Ned swims on he encounters existential insights, experiences growing doubts and faces increasing hostility from former friends and girlfriends. We realise all is not well… Lancaster gives a fine performance, the slickness of his advertising man’s charm contrasting with his balding pate and slacking muscles.