I have often thought that music is not merely an artistic activity, nor even simply a cultural one. For me, music is profoundly social. Almost every piece that means something to me is attached not only to sounds and melodies, but to people, places, journeys, friendships, loves and losses. Music has accompanied my life so closely that it has become impossible to separate the works themselves from the circumstances in which they entered my world.
Naturally, pop music will always be associated for me with parties, events, places, and, above all, girlfriends. Certain memories seem inseparable from particular songs and sounds. I think of the May ball at King’s College when Pink Floyd played that extraordinary finale from A Saucerful of Secrets, or of sleeping out in the open hitching in the wilds of Calabria, listening on a transistor radio to Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands.

Then there was Hendrix: that concert at Woburn Abbey, the atmosphere of the time, and the girlfriend who shared that period of my life. The music and the memories have become woven together, each bringing the other back into focus. So many moments, people, and landscapes are bound up with pop music that it seems almost impossible to separate one from the other.
Yet that is only one side of the story. Pop music provided the soundtrack to countless experiences, friendships, journeys, and romances. But when it comes to what is usually called classical music, an entirely different narrative begins to unfold—one that reaches beyond particular events and enters a deeper, more enduring landscape of discovery.
The remarkable thing is that so much of the music I cherish was introduced to me by other people. Mahler, for instance, came to me through a friend of my mother’s, Isabel Granger, a remarkable woman who was far ahead of her time in her work as a social worker helping women then termed unmarried mothers. She attended Mahler concerts at a time when Mahler was far less frequently performed than today. Through conversations about her enthusiasm, my mother became interested, and through my mother, so did I.
When I first heard Mahler’s First Symphony, in an inexpensive recording conducted by Paul Kletzki, I was overwhelmed. To my youthful ears it seemed almost like epic film music, vast and visionary. Mahler quickly became an obsession. Yet the music is inseparable from memory. My first truly important date with the young woman who would later become my wife was not at a restaurant or a theatre, but at a performance of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony in its completed version at the Royal Festival Hall. The work itself seemed to open a window onto another universe, and the memory remains inseparable from the music.

So much of my musical life is connected with friendships. Schubert, for example, will always remind me of two friends, one from school and one from university. Both adored his piano music. One of them was dismissive of the symphonies, feeling that Schubert’s orchestral writing lacked the perfection of his keyboard works, but for the piano sonatas he had an almost religious devotion. Whenever I hear those sonatas or the sublime String Quintet, I hear not only Schubert but the voices of those friends. And what more sensuous music evoking those marine landscapes and sun filled or storm tossed holidays than Debussy’s La Mer?

Other composers entered my life through chance encounters. As a teenager I stayed with a family whose son was fascinated by César Franck. Until then I barely knew Franck’s name. Through him I discovered a composer whose music would remain with me for decades. Later, I heard the Symphonic Variations played at a celebratory concert at King’s College, Cambridge, in honour of then resident fellow EM Forster whose ninetieth birthday was being marked. Once again, the music became fused with people and place.
Indeed, places matter enormously. I have always loved visiting composers’ houses. There is something deeply moving about standing in the rooms where great music was conceived. In Vienna I visited the homes of Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven. Beethoven’s Eroica house remains particularly vivid in my memory because of the circumstances. We parked our car nearby, only for a violent thunderstorm to erupt. At the same time, a tram was ringing its bell furiously because our car was obstructing its route. My wife dashed down the street to move the vehicle while thunder rolled overhead in. Ever since, Beethoven’s house has been associated in my mind with storms and clanging tram bells.
Haydn evokes the open landscapes around Eisenstadt where we camped surrounded by a flock of ducks. And Mozart…

Handel recalls my motorbike tour to his birthplace in Saxony and combines that pastoral landscape to his house in London’s busy West End next door to Hendrix’s pad. Elgar belongs forever to the hills of Worcestershire.

These places have become part of the music itself. They remind me that great music does not emerge from abstraction but from real people living in real landscapes.

Music has also marked moments of sadness. One of Mendelssohn’s string quartets is forever linked in my memory with the loss of my beloved Lhasa Apso. Whenever I hear it, grief and beauty seem inseparable.

The same is true of friendships. My university friend Ian McCormick, who subsequently wrote seminal books on musical subjects, introduced me to much of Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams. Together we listened to recordings that were difficult to obtain at the time like that pirated thirteenth Symphony. Ian believed that Vaughan Williams’s Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies formed a great trilogy: conflict, peace and epilogue. It was a wonderful insight. Tragically, Ian later took his own life. Yet whenever I hear those symphonies, I hear his voice and remember his enthusiasm and generosity.
I have often found that music preserves people. Long after conversations have faded, a phrase from a quartet or a symphony can bring someone back into the room with astonishing clarity.
One of my earliest musical revelations occurred while I was playing in a school orchestra. We were performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. I sat among the second violins and found myself so captivated by the beauty of the music that I almost stopped playing. For a moment, practical matters vanished and only Mozart remained. It was one of those experiences that convince a person that music possesses a reality beyond ordinary existence.
Yet if there is one composer who anchors everything together, it is Bach.
My entire journey into classical music really began with a recording by Dinu Lipatti. On one side was Bach’s Partita No. 1; on the other, Mozart’s Sonata in A minor. It was Lipatti’s rendering of Bach that changed my life. Listening to that performance was like opening a door into a vast new world. Everything followed from it.
Decades later, Bach remains the centre. Whenever life becomes difficult, whenever events seem confused or overwhelming, I return to Bach. Somehow the music restores order. It gathers the scattered fragments of experience and places them into a pattern that makes sense. It allows me to find the thread of life again.
From the Partitas to the Well-Tempered Clavier, from the Cello Suites to the Brandenburg Concertos, Bach possesses an extraordinary ability to reconcile the intellect and the spirit. The music seems simultaneously human and cosmic. It is impossible for me to imagine life without it.

Indeed, I sometimes find it astonishing that there are people who have never encountered this music. I cannot help feeling that if more people listened to Bach, and indeed to great music generally, many of the world’s problems would become easier to bear. Music is a peacemaker. Music is a reconciler. It calms us. It enlarges us. It carries us beyond our immediate concerns and allows us to glimpse something greater than ourselves.
Perhaps there is a reason why Bach’s music was chosen to travel into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft. Faced with the challenge of representing humanity to the cosmos, those responsible turned instinctively to Bach. The choice seems entirely natural. In his music there is order, beauty, complexity, tenderness and transcendence. There is something that speaks not merely for a nation or a culture but for humanity itself.
And so, after all these years, I find that music remains one of the great constants of life. It is present in memory, in friendship, in love, in loss, in landscapes and in journeys. It accompanies us through triumph and disappointment alike. It reminds us of who we have been and suggests who we might become.
Music before us, music after us, music with us and beyond us.
Music now.
Music in the future.
Music forever.

Longoio is a small mountain hamlet in the Serchio Valley, within the municipality of Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany. It is one of those places where geography and human life are closely intertwined. Set among chestnut woods and steep slopes, the village has historically depended on a fragile balance between forest resources, agriculture, and more recently, industry.
Over time, the Serchio Valley became one of Italy’s important paper-producing districts. The industry developed organically from local conditions: abundant water, historic milling activity, and a long tradition of craft production. By the twentieth century, paper manufacturing and recycling had become central to the valley’s economy, shaping both employment and identity across small communities.
Within this context, the Pazzaglia family of Longoio is associated with the local paper industry. In its more recent form, this activity is linked to Tiziano Pazzaglia and the recycling sector through Green4 S.r.l. The company was locally rooted rather than part of a multinational structure, operating within a dense network of small and medium-sized firms that characterise the Serchio paper district.
Last month, a major fire broke out at the Green4 facility not far from Longoio. Local accounts indicate it began in an external storage area containing baled paper before spreading rapidly into the main warehouse. Fueled by highly combustible material, the fire produced a large plume of smoke visible across the valley and required an extensive emergency response.

The exact cause was not officially confirmed at the time of reporting, and investigations were reported to be ongoing.
The impact of the fire went beyond the industrial site itself. In villages like Longoio, industry is not separate from daily life: it is embedded in the community. Factories employ local residents, support surrounding families, and form part of the shared landscape. As a result, even those not directly affected by the facility experienced the fire as something immediate and disruptive.
In statements reported locally, Tiziano Pazzaglia described the loss in deeply personal terms, expressing that everything he had built was gone. As Pazzaglia said “there’s only one person who died in the fire and that is me ” His words reflected not only economic damage but the collapse of a long-standing continuity between family, work, and place.
The wider context is one of economic fragility. The paper sector in the region operates under constant pressure from shifting markets and tight margins, meaning that a single incident can have consequences that extend well beyond one site.
The event also occurred during a period of elevated fire risk in the region, where both forest fires and accidental industrial fires are a recurring seasonal concern. While official investigations focused on determining the cause, broader speculation in local settings is not uncommon, although no conclusions of deliberate action have been established.
More broadly, the fire highlights the vulnerability of a tightly interconnected valley economy, where employment, family networks, and industry are closely bound together. When disruption occurs, its effects are social as well as economic.
*
Longoio is one of several hamlets within Bagni di Lucca, and for those who live there it is not an abstract location but a lived environment. I have lived within the same municipality for over twenty years and that proximity shapes how events like this are experienced—not as distant news, but as part of the shared reality of the valley.
Over time, local life has also been shaped by small community institutions such as village shops, which for decades provided essential goods and acted as informal social centres. One such shop operated in Longoio for many years before closing more than a decade ago. It was run by Giorgia the wife of Sergio Pazzaglia the founder of the.factory destroyed by the fire. These kinds of places played an important role in the everyday fabric of the community.
While it is a relief that no lives were lost, the consequences are nonetheless significant. Many livelihoods have been affected at a time when the local economy is already under strain, and what follows requires not only investigation and reconstruction, but also support and resilience for n a valley like the Serchio and its tributary feeding Bagni di Lucca. the Lima , rebuilding is never purely technical. It is also about restoring stability, continuity, and confidence in a place where community and industry have always been deeply intertwined.

In common with the immortal works of art, in common with the greatest of beliefs, and in common with the war dead remembered in Laurence Binyon’s famous words, there are other things that, in a sense, shall not grow old.
These are our photographs.
Gone, one hopes, are the days when photographs simply vanished because they existed only as single paper prints tucked away in drawers, forgotten albums, or cardboard boxes in attics. Today, countless images inhabit their own curious form of eternity. They reside in the cloud, whether that be Amazon, Google, or some other digital repository. There they remain, often duplicated many times over, available not only to us but perhaps to future generations of descendants, archivists, historians and researchers.
Yet one thing is certain: we grow old.
When we look through our photographs, we do so for two contradictory reasons. We rejoice because they remind us of happy moments, of people we loved, of journeys taken and experiences shared. At the same time, we feel a certain sadness because those moments have passed. The holiday is over. The gathering has dispersed. The children have grown. Friends have departed. Some are no longer with us.
The photographs remain, but time has moved on.
That is why old photographs possess such emotional power. They allow us to meet our younger selves again. They show how much has changed, and how much has not. They belong to two worlds at once: the past in which they were taken, and the present in which they are seen.
Recently, I have had enormous pleasure rediscovering old photographs from the pre-digital era. These are not images automatically uploaded from smartphones. They are prints from the age of film, when every exposure mattered. Many survived and have now been scanned.
Once scanned, however, another question arises.
What should we do with them?
Should we preserve them exactly as they are, complete with fading colours, scratches, dust marks, creases and tears? Or should we restore them?
I eventually reached my own conclusion. The original print should always be preserved. That is the archivist’s first rule. But once that has been done, I see no objection to restoration. Indeed, I find great satisfaction in it.
At a basic level, restoration involves cropping, straightening, adjusting brightness and contrast, correcting colour balance, and removing blemishes. These are corrective processes. They compensate for the injuries inflicted by time.
But today we also have new tools. Artificial intelligence has entered the field. I use a variety of systems, each with strengths and weaknesses, and each capable in different ways of removing damage, recovering detail, or restoring clarity to faded images.
This raises a question that is not merely technical, but philosophical.
Are we restoring the past, or recreating it?
Traditional restoration seeks to reveal what was already there. Artificial intelligence can sometimes go further, inferring details no longer visible. The boundary between restoration and interpretation becomes less certain.
Yet when used carefully, the results can be deeply moving.
This question became unexpectedly personal when I returned to a photograph taken during my final year at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1971.

The photograph shows Sandra leaning out of the window of my lodgings overlooking King’s Parade, with the buildings of Gonville and Caius College visible behind her. At the time, it seemed an entirely ordinary image, capturing nothing more than a moment on an ordinary day.
Yet more than fifty years later, it has come to mean far more than the instant it recorded.
During restoration, I found myself struck by a curious thought. Sandra does not appear younger because the photograph has been restored. She was younger. That was simply the reality of 1971.
What had aged was not Sandra, but the photograph itself.
Over decades, the print had accumulated its own history. Colours faded. Detail softened. The surface bore the marks of time. Restoration removed much of that accumulated photographic age and brought the image closer to its original state.
It is a strange reversal. The woman in the photograph remains fixed in that moment in 1971. The photograph, however, continued ageing year after year. Restoration allows the image to move slightly back toward its own youth, even though time itself remains unchanged.
The photograph is important for another reason. It forms part of what I think of as a three-part trilogy.
The first part began in 1966 and ended in 1967 when circumstances prevented it from continuing. The second part should perhaps have completed it, but instead it amounted to only a single day. Sandra came to Cambridge, we spent that day together, and then our paths diverged again.
Looking back, the photograph seems less like an ending than a pause between chapters.
Six years passed before we met again.
India played an unexpected role in what followed. During a visit there in 1971, I met a friend who later came to England on business and asked to be shown around London. In that moment, I remembered someone I had once known.
Why not Sandra?
The introduction was made, and one day the two of them came to see me. What seemed a simple arrangement became a turning point. The loose threads of the earlier chapters were drawn together, and the third part of the trilogy quietly began.
Unlike the first two parts, this third part did not end.
That is why this photograph carries such significance. It captures a moment when neither of us could have known what lay ahead. Seen simply, it is a young woman leaning from a Cambridge window on a day in 1971. Seen in the context of what followed, it becomes a threshold between an unfinished past and a continuing future.
Photographs have a unique relationship with time. They preserve a moment so completely that it never changes, yet the meanings we attach to it continue to grow. A casual image may, decades later, reveal itself as a turning point.
Perhaps that is why restoring photographs is so satisfying. We know that life is brief. We know that youth fades. We know that moments pass beyond recall. Yet by preserving and restoring images, something is rescued from oblivion.
The ancient Romans observed that ars longa, vita brevis — art is long, life is short.
Photographs are long too.
They may outlive us by generations, carrying fragments of lives that would otherwise disappear.
Not immortal, perhaps. Nothing material is truly immortal.
But they endure.
And when we restore an old photograph and see a loved one looking back across half a century, it can feel, if only for a moment, like a conversation across time.
Sometimes a single photograph captures only a fraction of a second.
Sometimes that fraction contains an entire lifetime.

BY THE LEDGE

The golden light of Cambridge softly gleams,

You wait within the glass, a spirit bright,

The tide of destiny flows through our dreams.

​I did not know the hardship in the schemes,

Or why I missed the comfort of your sight;

The golden light of Cambridge softly gleams.

​We weathered long and lonely, distant streams,

To find the way back through the darkest night,

The tide of destiny flows through our dreams.

​Your beauty, heavenly, transcends the themes,

That poets weave in verses of delight;

The golden light of Cambridge softly gleams.

​Though time took all our certainty and seams,

And trials forced us to the bitter height,

The tide of destiny flows through our dreams.

​A love inevitable, beyond the extremes,

Has brought you to my arms, to hold you tight;

The golden light of Cambridge softly gleams,

The tide of destiny flows through our dreams.

Anyone travelling up from Ponte a Serraglio towards Granaiola knows the Global Village, housed in the buildings that once formed part of the Demidoff complex. Few people, however, notice what stands just beyond it.
On the right-hand side of the road, almost hidden by vegetation, is a small abandoned chapel. For years it remained smothered by brambles, ivy and bamboo, so much so that many motorists passed by without ever realising it was there. It was Sandra who found the chapel and brought it to my notice Today, thanks to some clearing of the surrounding growth, it has become visible once again and is beginning to catch the eye of those who travel this road.

At first glance it might appear to be nothing more than a roadside shrine. Looking more closely, however, it is clearly something more substantial. The façade has a proper entrance protected by an ornate wrought-iron gate, and behind it can be seen a larger stone structure, now almost completely engulfed by greenery.
It is not the Oratory of Madonna della Neve, which stands much higher up, just below the village of Granaiola. This little building seems to belong to a different and less familiar story. It may have been a private nineteenth-century oratory connected with an estate that has long since disappeared, or perhaps a chapel built for travellers making their way along the old route to Granaiola.
For the moment, its origins remain something of a mystery. Local guides and lists of religious buildings in the area do not appear to mention it clearly, and that only adds to its fascination. It is one of those places that survive the passing of time, forgotten by most people yet still quietly present in the landscape.
Looking at it today, with its weathered walls and the vegetation slowly reclaiming it, it is easy to imagine a time when the chapel was cared for, visited regularly and lit by candles. Perhaps local farmers stopped there to say a prayer before climbing to the fields above Granaiola. Perhaps travellers paused for a moment of devotion as they made their way along the road.
For now, we do not know its name or its exact history. Yet this small chapel on the road to Granaiola serves as a reminder that in Bagni di Lucca even the most hidden corners can preserve fragments of a past still waiting to be rediscovered.

Today is 2 June — Italy’s Republic Day — a public holiday and date that carries significance far beyond ceremony. It marks the moment in 1946 when Italians, emerging from the devastation of the Second World War and the collapse of fascism, voted to become a republic and to leave behind the monarchy and the legacy of Fascist Italy. It was not simply a change of government, but a re-founding of political legitimacy on democratic principles.
That decision grew directly out of the catastrophe of World War II. In Italy, the war was not only something suffered from the outside; it became internal, fragmented, and ultimately divided. In the final phase of the conflict, occupation and resistance produced a civil war within the wider war itself — a rupture that turned political disagreement into lived conflict between compatriots. That experience left a deep imprint on the national psyche, still visible in memorials, landscapes, and family memory across the country.

That rupture is also one of the central themes explored in Anna Valencia’s novel ‘The Chestnut House’ set in our part of the world and more specifically the Garfagnana. Anna Valencia is a friend who I met through a cat donation from her while she was living in this area and I translated her unputdownable work into Italian because its subject matter carries equal importance for an Italian audience. The novel brings this chapter of Italian history into vivid human focus, showing how civil division and wartime occupation penetrated ordinary lives. It is particularly powerful because it translates political rupture into lived experience, reminding us that behind every constitutional transformation lie private stories of survival, loss, and reconstruction.
Against this background, the Republic was not a triumph in the conventional sense. It was a reconstruction — political, social, and moral. Italy did not simply emerge both defeated and victorious; it reassembled itself from collapse. The republic represented an attempt to restore order, justice, and democratic continuity after dictatorship and war, and to redefine the relationship between citizens and the state on new foundations.
This gives Italy’s experience a particular intensity compared with countries that were not occupied in the same way. Britain, for example, endured severe bombing and wartime loss but was not occupied (with the exception of the Channel Islands). Its post-war transformation therefore took place within an uninterrupted constitutional framework. The reforms of the Labour government under Clement Attlee reshaped welfare, housing, and the economy, but within a stable institutional continuity.
Italy’s transformation was more fundamental. The 1946 referendum that created the republic was also the first national vote in which women participated fully, marking a profound shift in civic identity at the moment of national re-foundation. Citizenship was no longer inherited or restricted; it was actively extended as part of the republic’s creation.
All of this unfolded under the early pressures of the Cold War. Europe was dividing into opposing spheres of influence, and Italy stood at a strategic crossroads, with tensions reflected in issues such as Trieste and the wider presence of the emerging Iron Curtain. Despite this instability, the republic aligned itself with democratic institutions and the long process of European reconstruction.

In my own family, this connection is direct. My wife’s father was an Italian army radio operator at El Alamein, responsible for battlefield communications in the North African campaign while my father was a British Eighth Army tank driver involved in armoured warfare and the maintenance and repair of vehicles in the same theatre. These were not abstract roles but essential functions within the machinery of one of the most decisive battles of the war. Both men were part of the same immense historical moment, each contributing in different ways to the same conflict.
Like many of their generation, they did not often speak in detail about what they had experienced – although my dad mentioned that he found it exciting to be involved in it. The war was present but contained — carried in silence as much as in memory. Yet it shaped everything that followed.
That silence reflected a wider post-war condition. Many who had lived through the conflict preferred not to revisit it. The priority became rebuilding life: restoring stability, expanding opportunity, and moving toward a world defined by normality rather than survival. Across Europe, austerity and scarcity lingered into the 1950s, but they coexisted with a strong desire to build a more secure and hopeful future.
Even so, the war never fully disappeared from culture or consciousness. It remained embedded in education, public life, and entertainment, where it appeared as shared reference rather than distant history. Over time, however, that immediacy faded, and lived experience gradually became historical knowledge.

This is why Republic Day retains such importance in Italy. It is not simply a celebration of constitutional form, but a reminder of how that form was created: through occupation, civil fracture, resistance, reconstruction, and a conscious decision to rebuild public life on principles of justice, equality, and participation. To think that Italian women had to wait until 1946 to be able to vote and that now just eighty years later the country is governed by a female prime minister who has already served longer than most Italian prime ministers and where the opposition leader is also a woman.
Over time, Italy’s republic has also become part of a wider European story — one shaped by countries emerging from war and choosing cooperation over conflict, stability over fragmentation, and institutions over collapse. Italy’s role within that process reflects both national recovery and continental reconstruction.
In the end, Republic Day is not only about 1946. It is about continuity — the deliberate, fragile continuity of democracy itself. It is a reminder that freedom is never automatic, justice is never permanent without effort, and the republic exists only as long as each generation chooses to sustain it.

For those of us belonging to the Baby Boomer generation, born in the immediate post-war years, this history was never distant. It was still present in the people around us. Our parents belonged to the wartime generation, and their lives were shaped by experiences that continued to define the post-war world even when not spoken aloud. The Second World War was not only present in parental memory, but also in education and culture: we were taught by teachers who themselves had directly experienced wartime service or national service, and only the very youngest teachers had escaped that direct involvement. The war therefore remained embedded in the classroom as part of lived authority, not abstract history. At the same time, it persisted in public culture and the media — in BBC broadcasting, in television, and even in comedy. Series such as Dad’s Army treated wartime experience as shared cultural memory, while Fawlty Towers could rely on its famous phrase “don’t mention the war” precisely because the subject still sat so close to the surface of everyday life.

The War was still present even in the playful antics of our English secondary school scout summer camp antics.

.When memory becomes history, it gains perspective but loses immediacy. What once felt close becomes something studied, and with that distance comes a risk: that the cost of democratic stability — the fragility behind it — becomes easier to forget.
This is why Republic Day retains such importance in Italy. It is not simply a celebration of constitutional form, but a reminder of how that form was created: through occupation, civil fracture, resistance, reconstruction, and a conscious decision to rebuild public life on principles of justice, equality, and participation.