REFLECTIONS ON THE LAST WEEK OF MY FIFTIES

Mozart’s Requiem and the Adagio of the clarinet concerto

The majesty of Klimt’s dancers and the delicacy of his field of poppies

Toulouse-Lautrec’s dancers, now in the partying shadows of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, for fear of daylight tainting their delicate ribbons

The genius of Rilke and the comfort he gives on every page of Letters to a Young Poet

Brahms’s violin concerto

The sculptures of Isaac Cordal in urban environments, speaking to the destruction of the world

The sonnets of Shakespeare

John Keats’s uplifting, heartrending letters to Fanny Brawne

The amphitheatre of Rome

The Eiffel Tower

Huddling over a hot mulled wine at the foot of the Champs- Élysées Paris Christmas market

Eurostar, effortlessly making it through 17 miles under water, linking England to Paris

The smell of the Nutella crêpe stall as you emerge from Paris’s St Germain des Prés Metro into the chill of Boulevard St Germain

Dusk falling on the mountains of southern Spain on the road from Marbella airport to the coast

Seeing a real Picasso for the first time, breath shooting of your chest with the punch of something “other” – and you really don’t know what

Rodin’s The Kiss in Paris’s Musée Rodin, the figures emerging from their marble, as if for the first time, out of duty for every tourist, then sinking back into rest, sure of their eternal togetherness

Oysters and champagne at Bofinger at the Bastille on a Sunday morning after a stroll through Paris’s 4th Arrondissement

Sailing around the Mediterranean, salt, wine and laughter editing the shoreline out of sight

Lighting a candle on the Island of the Dead in Venice, even though you don’t believe, but want to pay tribute to the children’s section of these souls forever young

Sharing a bottle of Greek brandy with a stranger in Crete, high on a visit to this country’s exquisite islands

The French Impressionists

Warsaw’s silent celebratory streets after Solidarnosc in 1983

Beethoven’s Fifth

Mahler’s Fifth

Mahler’s First, Second, Third, Fourth . . .

Mahler

Mahler’s gravestone in the Grinzing Cemetery in Vienna – ‘He who seeks me, knows who I was. The others do not have to know.’

I know who I am and am so proud to have seen, heard, witnessed and know about all of these things. I am a proud European who, every day of my life, celebrates everything to which Europe has exposed and given me, and I will defend it to my dying breath.