In early this morning to make my choice and cast my vote in the European Economic and Social Committee’s annual video challenge. There is a strong field of some forty videos and it is great fun just to surf through them and enjoy the entrants’ creativity and inventiveness. But if you are not an EU employee you could also win yourself an I-Pad! Voting is open until midday today and I warmly encourage anybody who is interested in how Europeans see Europe to take a look.

Hard on the heels of the untimely death of Davy Jones, of The Monkees fame (and the man whose mid-1960s obiquity obliged David Robert Jones to become David Bowie) comes news of the equally untimely death of Lucio Dalla. If the Monkees’ hits (and their zany television show) will always remind me of my childhood, Dalla’s music will forever remind me of my first years in Italy. Dalla was from Bologna, which is where I was living and studying when Balla Balla Ballarina became a big hit (in 1980). Dalla, who started out in jazz bands, was perhaps best known for Caruso, but Balla Balla was part of the aural wallpaper of that year and an integral part of my Bolognese experience because Dalla had only recently (so we were told) quit performing in some of the osterie we frequented as students and was fêted as a good local lad who’d made good. In any case, he belonged to a rich stable of brilliant Italian singer-songwriters who had honed and polished their talents long before the big time struck.

To the Warehouse Studio this evening to see the English Comedy Club’s current production of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables. The play is set in the Beauregard Private Hotel in Bournemouth in the mid-1950s. It has two acts, separated by eighteen months, and all of the scenes take place in the dining room and lounge. The England of the 1950s – drear, repressed, – is well portrayed. It was a land of poor food and seedy lodging houses and of spinsters and widowers eking out a sort of existence in south coast hotels. A former politician’s past catches up with him and a philanderer masquerading as a retired major is unmasked.  The hotel staff and the ‘permanent guests’ provide the social backdrop. This is Fawlty Towers with gall. It is also a world that has disappeared. Looking at the play today is a little like opening a first edition of an Elisabeth David cookery book. The grey world of rationing that David fought against has also gone, yet we read her recipes today with the same pleasure we watch Rattigan dissecting social mores and repressed passions. This is a strong production with a good cast. It’s on until 10 March and is well worth watching.

This afternoon I chaired a meeting of the EESC’s IT Steering Committee, which brings together our IT services with our IT users (senior management) to discuss and approve the Committee’s IT work plan and to make sure that the present and future needs of the operational services will be adequately supported. IT policy is by its very nature long-term and it is important that we should get this bit of the governance equation right, particularly in a period of austerity, when resources will be particularly scarce and investments more fiercely scrutinised. The big projects on our agenda today were our future migration to a European Commission software package for the management of human resources, the improvement of an in-house work-flow management programme, the creation of a pilot civil society consultative platform and the electronic management and archiving of documents. Thanks to the excellent preparatory work of super-Bernard (to whom go grateful thanks) all went very well.

At lunchtime today the European Economic and Social Committee threw its doors open for a public screening of a documentary film about the comprehensive restoration and embellishment with modern art of Frederik VIII’s Palace in Copenhagen before it became the official palace of the Crown Prince couple. The Committee is hosting a photographic exhibition (also open to the public) about the complicated resoration project and in late January the royal couple themselves came to visit the Committee and the exhibition. Their commitment to the project and their enthusiasm for modern art and artists comes across strongly in the film, as does their essential simplicity and attachment to their young family. Other points I found particularly interesting in the film were the interactions between modern artists and techniques and an ancient building and materials, the very particular way in which rooms (with pre-imposed dimensions and perspectives) may inspire commissioned artists, and the necessarily open-ended nature of such a restoration project (towards the end of the project, for example, dry rot was discovered in a wooden beam, imposing extra costs and stretching the completion date). The film is available on a loop alongside the photographic exhibition and is worth a watch if you’re in the neighbourhood. The house of organised civil society likes opening its doors to the public!

Tonight, thanks to a generous gift from E (thank you!), we watched George Clooney’s 2002 directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a biographical spy thriller based on the real life claims of American game show producer Chuck Barris. In one life, the public life, Barris, played by Sam Rockwell, is in the front wave of the new 1960s television programmes that based themselves on audience participation and mass voyeurism. He staggers from success to success and from priapic conquest to conquest. In another, parallel, life, he is a CIA assassin who carries out his hits whilst on mission for his first life. Drew Barrymore suffers as the frequently betrayed but patiently waiting true love back home, and Julia Roberts as the Mata Hari femme fatale figure dominating his other life. There is more than one autobiographical aspect to the film, in which the real Chuck Barris was deeply involved, for Clooney’s own father had a TV game show and the young Clooney grew up with cue cards and intermission acts. The film, which bombed at the box office, was highly rated by the critics and is well worth watching. Anybody who has known sufferers of Münchausen syndrome will know where this film is coming from.

This evening I had a drink with a Scottish friend, a fellow high-up in another institution. Somehow we got on to a chat about the relative distance of war and he told a moving tale. In February 1917 his grandfather signed up to the Army, crossed the Channel and joined the British forces on the Western Front. He kept a diary of his experiences until he was wounded and invalided out in October of the same year. The diary (which I have now read) is full of laconic and ironic entries. Somehow, the short, terse, descriptions of the horror and terror he lived through render everything more vivid. The diary is also full of familiar place names. Seventy years later my friend came to Belgium for the first time and travelled through the landscape (around Armentières – that’s the station of Armentères in the picture) described in his grandfather’s diary. Now, viewed from the Thalys, it is pastoral land; vast fields, occasional copses, neat brick villages. Then, as his grandfather’s diary entries make clear, it was hell on earth.

This afternoon I gave my traditional closing address to new colleagues joining the European Economic and Social Committee’s staff. My talk comes at the end of a two day information programme, and I see my task as being to put everything in perspective. In the first place, the more I have come to know of the EESC, the more I am convinced of its unique role, derived from the authenticity of its members, who don’t get a salary and can genuinely be described as volunteers. In the second place, we put a lot of emphasis, collectively, on having a good and positive working environment in the Committee; it’s a good place to be and to work, with a happy, highly professional and efficient work force. In the third place, we are immensely privileged, both in terms of the quality of our work (working together with so many nationalities and in different languages is, of itself, I believe, a wonderful experience) and our conditions (a decent salary, a job for life and a pension afterwards is an increasingly rare phenomenon). Last but not least, we should never forget that our ultimate masters are the people, Europe’s citizens, on whose behalf we purport to work. Here endeth the sermon.

A working lunch today, at the invitation of former EESC President Dimitris Dimitriadis, with a delegation of the National Confederation of Hellenic Commerce, headed by its President, Vassilis Korkidis. On our side, our President, Staffan Nilsson (in the picture with Korkidis), Vice-President Jacek Krawczyk, former Vice-President, Irini Pari and REX Section Chairman, Sandy Boyle. Korkidis explained that the delegation had come to Brussels to correct the misleading impression given by media coverage of the situation in Greece. Yes, things were grim, with tax over 40 per cent and wages slashed by 30 %, two-thirds of people living off of their savings, 1 million unemployed and 28% of the population under the poverty line. But most people were not rioting and over 80 per cent of the Greek people continued to favour membership of the EU and of the euro because they believed, despite all the pain, that it was the best alternative. Certainly, he insisted, no Greek businessman wanted a return to the drachma. The emphasis now must be on facilitating growth and enterprise. The Confederation had identified eight ‘rising star’ areas of economic activity (including tourism, wholesale retail, east-west trade, ports, shipping, recycling, agriculture and solar energy) where Greece had a comparative advantage and should be pushing hard. But, he acknowledged, all this was against a grim backdrop: by 2021 the Greek economy will be where it was in 2009.

After the keynote speeches I dashed one floor down from the Employees’ Group’s meeting to a public hearing organised by the EESC’s ‘ECO’ Section on the theme of the EU Budget 2014-2020, a topic on which the Committee is producing an opinion (rapporteur = Stefano Palmieri, Employees’ Group, Italy). The Chairman of the Study Group, Seppo Kallio (Various Interests’ Group, Finland), introduced EESC President Staffan Nilsson and two guest keynote speakers; European Commissioner Janusz Lewandowski (who was at the working dinner in the Parliament yesterday evening) and the European Parliament’s rapporteur on the multi-annual financial perspectives, Ivailo Kalfin. Both speakers highlighted a number of ironies: the EU budget is in decline (a projected 20% decrease between the 1990s and 2020) whilst national budgets are steadily increasing; that no deficits are possible, whereas a number of member states have run up massive deficits; and that administrative spending, at 6%, is very low compared with any national budget. The relative decline in the EU budget means that it is becoming less powerful as a tool and therefore must be carefully focused in order to enhance its impact, hence the Commission’s proposal to shift resources away from agriculture and towards innovation, research and education – areas in which the EU has a comparative advantage.