In-laws away!

We’d come to the Ardennes for a two day trek around the Semois valley with an extended group of the in-laws. This is a beautiful part of the world. The Semois is a shallow and placid river at this time of year. We crossed it on a wicker bridge (pont de claies). I’ve never come across one of these before, but such constructions were clearly typical of the region, as can be seen from the images at this site. Not for the first time when traversing European countryside, I was conscious of the industry that had not so long ago given the landscape its characteristic features. In the case of the Semois valley, with its particular micro-climate, it was the tobacco industry. Indeed, some of the older Belgians in the party remembered Semois pipe tobacco as being the best and the most fragrant through until the 1970s. There are still plenty of the special structures in which the tobacco was hung to dry dotted about the landscape but since they are built of wood most will disappear before too long.

This evening we drove down to the Ardennes, picking up a nephew in Ciney on our way down. Recalling my 16 July post about the 14 July storm that hit Belgium, Ciney was one of the worst-hit towns. As we drove off the motorway we saw electricity pylons lying crumpled in the fields. Close to the town, whole rows of trees had not so much been uprooted as snapped off violently, as though there had been one sudden and brutal gust. But the most spectacular damage of all was done to the collegial church in the centre of town, where a large part of the spire fell into the apse (see photo), and a school lost its entire roof. Miraculously, there was only one death, a lorry driver, in Belgium. But it so clearly could have been much, much worse. (In Jodoigne a large group of schoolchildren got out of a gymnasium minutes before the roof collapsed.) Aeons ago, before the motorway was built, we used to drive up to Brussels through a town called L’église. It was just an Ardennes town, but it had one particularity; all of the slate roofs were new. The reason was that the town had been hit by a mini-tornado. I remember thinking at the time that this must have been an extraordinarily rare occurrence. Not quite so rare, it seems….

I have a friend who thinks that those in positions of responsibility and/or working long hours inevitably fall ill during holidays. This is because they can. Put another way, the body and the mind put up an invisible forcefield that enables them to carry on except when they don’t need to. No sooner does the forcefield come down than the opportunistic infections dash in and the body, exhausted, capitulates. That’s certainly what it felt like this morning. However, by the afternoon I was feeling well enough to stagger out of bed and into town to participate in the Belgian National Holiday festivities. We watched the disturbingly low flypast (I was later told that this was because the cloud base was so low and that the low altitude was controversially risky), and then the procession. Later still, we watched the traditional firework display from John B’s terrace. (This time, there was no annoying helicopter. Perhaps my 21st July 2009 post had an effect!) Maybe my illness coloured my perceptions, but it seemed to me that there was an air of economy about the festivities. That would be understandable, but it left us a little disappointed…

There was an interesting and at times impassioned discussion in this morning’s meeting of the EESC’s Budget Group about the post-Lisbon Treaty budgetary procedure. I have bored on about this in previous posts. Suffice it to say here that the smaller institutions find themselves in a weaker position than was previously the case. The general consensus in the Budget Group was, to borrow from Jackie Chan, that we have to ‘focus more on our focus’. Previously, the smaller institutions would only engage in heavy political lobbying if they faced a particular problem or had one-off specific reasons to ask for a significant increase. Now, though, they will have to lobby constantly. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is a crowded marketplace out there and such lobbying will inevitably require redirecting some resources and energy from other activities. Whether this was what the Treaty’s draftsmen intended is a moot point.

I promised to track down the article (see previous post) and have managed to do so. ‘The unlamented West’, by novelist and travel writer Jonathan Raban, was published in The New Yorker on 20 May 1996. The sub-title read: ‘Militias, Freemen, mad bombers – why do so many extreme and dangerous individualists seem to come from one place?’ In this fascinating article, Raban describes how the Chicago, Milwaukee and St Paul Railroad spread out into essentially unfarmable land in Montana. The railroad company ‘flung infant cities into being at intervals of a dozen miles or so’, in a deliberate attempt to create demand for its own services. On the back of a government bill pushed through Congress for the benefit of the railroad companies, sharp advertising created the illusion that this was the promised land and many families, including many immigrant families, came in the hope of establishing a decent life as homesteaders. What they didn’t – couldn’t – know was that, where it existed, the topsoil was wafer thin and would soon be blown away, that the summers were arid and that the winters were terrifyingly cold. Within a few seasons most of the new arrivals were beaten and would pack up and head back to the nearest city: ‘The corporation bosses… ran their lines to the coast at … the expense of hundreds of thousands of would-be farmers, who bought the government pitch and saw their families ‘starve out’ on their claims.’ We should not be so surprised, writes Raban, that twenty million Americans still believe that the 1969 moon walk was a hoax, perpetrated in the Arizon desert by the federal government, for the financial benefit of the powerful corporations who were the NASA contractors: ‘After all, in 1909 the government really did drop people onto an expanse of land that closely resembles the dusty surface of the moon…’  The federal government, he concludes, ‘would be remembered by many in the West as a trickster, never to be trusted again.’

A few weeks back, on New York’s Pier 52, awaiting Macy’s fireworks spectacular, I got talking with one of my fellow guests, Anne, about what I had seen on Ellis Island. I told her that, without wishing to sound pompous or pretentious, I had got a number of profound insights into the American psyche from my visit. One of these insights came during an excellent thirty-minute film that visitors can watch in the old processing station. The film has a Shoah-like atmosphere. The trip to the States was, for many European immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a deeply traumatic experience. Just to get there was, in itself, proof that you were a survivor. But there was no guarantee you could stay. About two per cent of would-be immigrants were sent back to Europe. If you had trachoma – a highly contagious eye disease – you were immediately returned. Now, just imagine if you had sold your farm or small holding and all of your worldly goods in order to buy a one-way passage for your wife and your two children to a new life in America, and then at Ellis Island they discover that your daughter has trachoma. What do you do? Go back? Send her back alone? Split up the family, with no guarantee that you would ever be re-united? Anyway, the insight was through an interview with an immigrant from those far-flung times. Many Central and Eastern European immigrants were fleeing repression of one sort or another. ‘The word ‘government’ frightened me,’ said the immigrant in the interview. ”Government’ meant tyranny.’  I told this to Anne and then described the ticket office, with signs in so many languages, where immigrants, once admitted, could buy railroad tickets to anywhere. ‘Ah,’ said Anne. ‘That reminds me of an article I read a few years back in The New Yorker magazine. It was about railroads and immigrants and anti-government resentment…’ 

Last night I stayed up to watch the last Jonathan Ross show on the BBC. The guests consisted of Mickey Rourke, David Beckham and Jackie Chan (and Roxy Music, I should add). Chan still can’t speak English properly, but he was nevertheless eloquent about the beginning of his life. He trained rigorously in the martial arts for ten years (one of the exercises he described was running, for one hour, whilst holding a full glass of water in each hand – spillage resulted in severe punishment). Chan was on the show to push his latest film, a remake of The Karate Kid. He was clearly genuinely enthusiastic about his co-star in the film, Jaden Smith, the twelve year-old son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. Today, we went to see for ourselves. Chan is his usual excellent self, but Jaden Smith was everything Chan had said he was. For a start, he is a very handsome and telegenic boy, but he is also a great actor and a brilliant gymnast and he really does carry off his role with aplomb. High praise is also due to Zhenwei Wang, who plays villainous bully and ultimately Smith’s opponent, Cheng. This is not a great film but it is a good one. The script is leavened, as always in Chan films, with cod-philosophy. I noted: ‘the best fight is a fight avoided’; and ‘in a fight with an angry blind man, keep your distance.’ And also ‘There is a huge difference between sitting still and doing nothing.’ Good fun.

This evening I drove down to a place near Spa to pick up N° 2 sprog from his camp. The trip gave me the chance to ‘read’ the first part of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower. It’s an extraordinary story and very well told (the CD version I ‘read’ was well narrated by George Guidal). Philbrick starts with the separatists in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire who would become the Pilgrims. Rightly fearing persecution, they went into exile in the Netherlands, ending up at Leiden. Once there installed, and enjoying religious freedom, the community began to fight among itself. The vision, of the whole community travelling to a new land, was intended to encourage collegiality, though in the end only a part of the community left. The Pilgrims’ initial journey began in Delfshaven, in the Netherlands, and not with the Mayflower, but another boat, the Speedwell. Unbeknown to them, though, the Dutch were afraid that they would manage to colonise Manhattan first and skullduggery was afoot. The Speedwell was supposed to accompany the later-acquired Mayflower. The two ships first set out from Southampton, but the Speedwell developed a leak and so they had to dock at Dartmouth for repairs. They set out from there a second time and, when the Speedwell once more sprang a leak, they turned back, this time to Plymouth. For a third time they set off, this time all aboard the now crowded Mayflower, with their provisions depleted, and with winter setting in. It was subsequently discovered that there was nothing wrong with the Speedwell. Its crew had deliberately over-sailed it so that the mast would act as a lever and force the planks in the hull apart. I look forward to ‘reading’ the rest, but what a story already!

This week’s EESC plenary session took place in the European Commission’s Charlemagne building. When meetings are in session a set of vast blinds close so that there is only artificial light in the meeting room. At lunchtime on Wednesday, 14th July, it was bright and sunny. The afternoon’s session started at two-thirty and ended at close to nine. When the shutters came back up, bright sunshine flooded into the room and we blinked like troglodytes. However, as I walked back home it became clear that something pretty violent had occurred. Though the pavements were dry, gravel had been washed into piles in the middle of the street and sizeable tree branches had fallen on cars. The next day’s newspapers spoke about a mini-tornado and others about a mini-hurricane, but I think it was closer to what we would call a ‘cloudburst’ and the Italians a ‘nubifragio‘. Video footage here gives an idea. I, who had seen strictly nothing inside the hermetically sealed and artificially-lit meeting room, received three chilling eye-witness accounts. The first came from my better half, who had been walking in the Ardennes with her sister. She told of how the sky went suddenly dark and how they ran for shelter in a village. More chilling yet, N° 1 sprog was in a yacht in the middle of a lake, at summer camp. She told of how the monitors sought desperately to get 80 students and twenty yachts off the lake, to get the sails down, the boats secured and the children under shelter in a few minutes. They succeeded, although one yacht got blown away and battered. N° 2 sprog, meanwhile, was in the middle of a Belgian forest and a map-reading exercise (or ‘getting lost exercise’, as he put it), and had to navigate his way back to camp over a series of fallen trees. For me, the experience was a sort of microcosmic version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five…

This morning the plenary session was addressed by Olivier Chastel, Belgian Secretary of State for European Affairs, who presented the incoming Presidency-in-Office’s programme and priorities. His detailed presentation and his courteously detailed replies to questions put to him in the ensuing debate put the lie to the idea that the creation of the permanent Presidency of the Council of the European Union has somehow rendered the traditional rotating six-month Presidencies of the Council of Ministers less important. (This is something I have consistently argued: the Lisbon Treaty created a new office but it did not do away with the told one.) Understandably, the Secretary of State was questioned repeatedly about whether a caretaker government could run an effective Presidency. His response, reading between the lines, was that, under the current circumstances, a caretaker government was probably better able to run an effective Presidency. This was because all domestic ideological competition was put on hold and all domestic political actors were determined to help Belgium produce an effective and efficient Presidency. From the very beginning, Belgium has always punched above its weight in Europe (think Paul-Henri Spaak), and this Presidency will, I suspect, be no different from its seventeen predecessors. The EU is in Belgians’ blood, if not their DNA.