The need to support Justin and Patricia through adolescence, trying in particular to help them achieve a satisfactory outcome to their educational choices, was a constant demand on our physical and emotional energy.

The acquisition and maintenance of the Glastonbury house for Florence, and the regular visits to see her, dictated a pattern of travel and holiday restrictions.

Our Avenue du Monoplan house itself seemed to bring a crisis almost every winter, whether it was storm damage to the roof, or a central heating failure. From time to time I had serious professional frustrations or disappointments at the Commission, although I knew I was acquiring management skills and was particularly privileged for a period to work on projects of direct interest to President Delors and his Cabinet.

All parents will recognise that the decisions which face children, as they make their final choices of secondary school subjects, and begin thinking about university applications, can be issues which engage the whole family over many months.

Certainly in our household, where both Anne and I had some knowledge and experience of the options involved, and yet wanted to respect – to the maximum – the importance of the personal choices to be made by Justin and Patricia, the discussions around A-Levels and UK University admissions, and the subject choices for the European Baccalauréat, were difficult and complex.

For Justin and Patricia themselves they were choices which had to be made in the context of their rapid personal development, including their choices of friends and patterns of personal and social decision-making.

A week’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1988, even if not that important, was probably my most valuable experience during the year. No one then imagined how close the collapse of Communism was, but the fact of that collapse meant that, as the 20th Century came to an end, it was valuable and most satisfying to be able to claim some knowledge of the processes of “glasnost” and “perestroika”, and to have some idea what people meant when they talked about “civil society”.

The fact that the week included not just five days in Moscow, but a weekend in Latvia, also proved invaluable. It gave me some understanding of the satellite-state predicament, which, in the case of Latvia, transformed at the end of the century into the challenge of European Union accession, a new opportunity for the Baltic States.

The invitation to visit the Soviet Union arose from my co-option to the European Committee of Quaker Peace and Service.

At that time Peter Jarman, a great enthusiast for bilateral activities involving Quakers and the USSR-GB Friendship Society, served as secretary to both the Europe and East-West Committees of QPS. When in June 1988 a programme was proposed that the 16th bilateral Friendship meeting from 19 to 26 September should include a two-day opportunity for the first non-Communist Party group to participate in a seminar at the Soviet Academy of Social Sciences, on the theme: “Towards a Block-Free Europe”, I found myself among the people Peter asked to take up the invitation.

It seemed an opportunity that was much too good to miss. The Commission authorities, including the Security Service (which at that time was obliged to interview officials visiting the Soviet Union, before and after their visit, whether it was of a personal or official nature) placed no obstacle in the way of my accepting the invitation on a personal basis. Preparations for the trip began to fall into place.

The day before flying by Aeroflot from London, Peter called his five visit-participants together for an initial get-together and briefing.

I found myself in a privileged position: I was the only Friend among the participants and Peter envisaged, in addition to the seminar, a series of Quaker contacts in Moscow, and in Riga (where we were to spend the weekend in the middle of the visit, it being cheaper for the Russians to accommodate us by way of two nights train travel and a night in Latvia).

Much of his briefing stressed the importance of our keeping in pairs whenever the group split up. Should we have the opportunity to visit “dissidents” outside the programme, we should be careful not to give details or information regarding any such contacts to our official host.

The sense of risk and of participation in the world of espionage was underlined by the Soviet authorities’ refusal to provide a visa for a London university lecturer, who had had the misfortune of being in the Chernobyl fallout zone at the time of the nuclear plant explosion there, and who had been prevented by the authorities from bringing dust back to London for analysis.

I had to weigh this advice against Eamon Lalor’s encouragement to “get around” as must as possible while I was there. It was a time when the metro and the streets were considered safe at night.

From the moment I saw the distinctive lines of the Aeroflot plane on the runway at Heathrow, to the moment I arrived back on the same runway, I found the whole trip fascinating. In addition to writing a piece for “Around Europe”, the newsletter of the Quaker Council for European Affairs, I gave a lunchtime lecture on my trip for the “Europeans for Peace” group, active at that time in the Community Institutions.

Although the weather in Moscow was bitterly cold, and in Latvia less cold but wet, I had a sense of warmth from everyone I met on the trip. I remember particularly sun glinting on the golden domes of the Kremlin churches. I think of the reaction of our interpreter, responding to a present of a bar of soap as if to a bar of gold. I think of the identical blocks of flats, where the padded inner doors hid the contrasting lives of film workers who could video our visit. I think of a professor and writer living as if in a Victorian study, of a thin housewife trying to look after two small children in chilly and spartan rooms as she sought to persuade us of the importance of her feminist activities, of the chaotic bearded housepainter – formerly a teacher – who thought he was founding Russia’s new Christian Democrat party.

Where Moscow was and looked Byzantine, Riga spoke of its European trading heritage. The port and its steeples often looked just like Antwerp. Art and culture seemed seminal to a people determined to show themselves as clearly distinguishable from the country’s large Russian population. Singing, and particularly church singing, would in time prove to be central to the Latvian revolution. There was a film festival in Riga which seemed every bit as avant-garde as anything one could imagine in the West.

On returning to Brussels, I suggested to the Irish Club that it should be possible to organise a small festival of Irish films in the new Rue de Spa clubrooms. Two members of the Committee expressed an interest and another project got under way from which I would learn a great deal.

The amount of material available on 16 mm was rather limited, but we nevertheless put together a respectable programme giving a good idea of the interest and competence of Irish directors.

My contribution was to prepare the notes on each film to be handed out to each audience, as per the Irish Film Society in Dublin, and to introduce each evening’s show. The funniest evening was the night we showed Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s “On A Paving Stone Mounted”. This was Irish avant-garde and it looked as if most of the audience would leave during the reel-change midway through.

While the projector was switched off, I did my best to raise a laugh and to assure everyone present that the best was yet to come. If you didn’t mind bad language and sacrilege, it was certainly a memorable night. The inter-cutting of documentary images of Éamon de Valera’s funeral cortege in Dublin, and the selected goat being carried to Killorglin in a cart, before taking his place as “King” on the Puck Fair tower, is still fresh in my mind.

Read more: 1989 – Filmmaking