A recent discussion on the local community page in Bagni di Lucca caught my attention. A newly arrived couple introduced themselves and said they were looking to meet other expatriates in the area and make friends. It was a perfectly reasonable request, warmly meant and politely expressed.

Yet the discussion that followed touched on a much larger question: when we choose to live in another country, what exactly is our responsibility towards that country and its people?

There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to meet people who share your language, culture or experience. Moving abroad can be lonely. It can be confusing. There are bureaucratic obstacles, practical difficulties and moments when hearing a familiar accent feels reassuring.

But there is another side to the story.

If we choose to live in another country, should we not also make some effort to become part of that country? Should we not try to learn the language, understand the culture and engage with the people around us?

This is where I find a certain contradiction.

In Britain, many people complain about immigrant communities that appear reluctant to integrate into wider society. They criticise the creation of parallel communities, where people live, work, socialise and educate their children largely within their own cultural group.

Yet some of those same people arrive in Spain, Portugal, France or Italy and proceed to do exactly the same thing.

They seek out English-speaking communities, English-speaking clubs, English-speaking services and English-speaking friends. Some spend years abroad without learning more than a handful of words in the local language.

The principle cannot change according to nationality. If integration matters in Britain, then surely it matters everywhere.

Perhaps part of the explanation lies in the way many people now approach life abroad.

For a significant number of British buyers, places such as Tuscany, Umbria or Abruzzo are not primarily cultural destinations. They are economic alternatives. Property prices in Britain have become so extraordinary that a modest holiday cottage in parts of Devon, Cornwall or Suffolk can cost as much as, or even more than, a beautiful rural property in Italy.

Faced with that reality, many people understandably look elsewhere. They discover picturesque villages, rolling hills, ancient stone houses and television programmes selling the dream of La Dolce Vita.

Some fall genuinely in love with the country.

Others fall in love with the dream.

The difference becomes apparent after a few years.

Many people buy, renovate and then leave, discovering that the reality of rural Italy involves more than sunshine and vineyards. It involves language, paperwork, patience, customs and ways of thinking that may be very different from their own.

For me, however, Italy was never simply a holiday destination.

For many years it was a holiday home. Eventually it became a place to live and work.

I taught, wrote, joined choirs, took part in local theatre, became involved in cultural activities and made friends. I never had to submit endless job applications because one recommendation led naturally to another. I found kindness, friendship and acceptance.

In short, I became part of a community.

Ironically, some of the most unpleasant experiences I encountered in Italy did not come from Italians at all. They came from fellow Britons.

I experienced hostility, aggression and even legal disputes that ultimately proved entirely unfounded. Those experiences were deeply unpleasant and lasted for years. Yet they taught me something important.

The problem was never nationality.

The problem was attitude.

The people I admired most were not necessarily Italian, British or American. They were simply people who approached life with curiosity, humility and respect.

One British woman I met had no interest whatsoever in recreating Britain abroad. She wanted to engage with Italy and Italians. An American resident expressed similar views. Both understood that living in another country means participating in that country’s life rather than merely observing it from behind a linguistic and cultural barrier.

At the same time, I have met people who owned magnificent properties yet could not hold the simplest conversation in Italian after years of living here.

That saddens me.

Not because language ability is a measure of intelligence or worth, but because language is the key that unlocks human connection. Without it, so much of life remains inaccessible.

Perhaps I see this differently because of my own background.

My mother was Italian. My wife is of Italian heritage. Between us, English and Italian flow so naturally that we often switch from one language to another without noticing. We have spent our lives moving between cultures rather than choosing one over the other.

That experience has taught me something else.

Identity is rarely as simple as the labels we use.

“Expat”, “immigrant”, “foreigner”, “local”—these words often conceal more than they reveal.

What matters is not what we call ourselves but how we behave.

Do we make an effort?

Do we show respect?

Do we try to understand the society around us?

Do we approach people with openness rather than assumptions?

These are the questions that truly matter.

Today, after many years in Italy, my wife and I live quietly in the countryside. We are fortunate. We have our home, our work, our interests and each other. We are close enough to town to participate in community life whenever we wish, yet far enough away to enjoy peace, solitude and the occasional visit from wild boar or deer rather than troublesome neighbours.

After nearly fifty years of marriage, we still enjoy one another’s company. In many ways, that feels like the greatest blessing of all.

Looking back, I regret nothing.

Italy has given me friendship, opportunity, culture and a sense of belonging. It has reinforced my belief that while countries, languages and traditions matter deeply, they are not the whole story.

Beyond nationality, beyond politics, beyond arguments about integration and identity, there remains a simpler truth.

We all belong to the same human family.

We may speak different languages. We may come from different countries. We may carry different histories.

But wherever we live, and whatever passport we carry, the challenge remains the same: to approach one another with curiosity, kindness and respect.

If we can do that, then perhaps we are already more integrated than we realise.

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At last, we have had some rain.
Not a violent thunderstorm, not a destructive downpour, but the sort of gentle rain that one can actually walk through and enjoy. A cool drizzle that settles on the skin like a refreshing shower. The temperature has fallen, the air feels cleaner, and the whole landscape seems to be breathing again.

The plants are happy. The animals are happy. Even the cats, who only yesterday were stretched out in exhausted surrender to the heat, have rediscovered some energy and dignity. In an Italian summer, rain can be a blessing. Today, it certainly feels like one.
Yet today also brought a rather sad reminder of the realities of life.
One of our cats arrived at the house carrying a little squirrel in its mouth. Not one of the grey tree rats that people often complain about in Britain, but a proper red squirrel, the sort of beautiful creature that is considered endangered and protected in England.
My wife screamed when she saw it, but somehow managed to rescue the squirrel from the jaws of her beloved cat. She held the tiny creature gently in her arms. It was still warm. I could feel its little heart beating. For a brief moment there was hope that it might survive.

As I watched this scene, I found myself thinking about the strange parallels between the world of nature and the world of politics. We often imagine nature as peaceful and harmonious, especially on a beautiful day after rain. Yet nature can be extraordinarily cruel. The cat follows its instincts. The squirrel follows its own struggle for survival. Neither understands fairness, justice or mercy.
And what are we supposed to do? Lock up the cats forever? Prevent them from being what they are? Yet at the same time, the squirrel is a beautiful creature and has as much right to live as anything else. There is no easy answer.
In a curious way, this small drama affected me more deeply than all the arguments about Brexit, governments and constitutions. Political debates can become abstract. A tiny squirrel fighting for life in one’s hands is not abstract at all. It is immediate, poignant and heartbreakingly real.
Perhaps that is one of life’s lessons. We spend endless hours discussing nations, systems and ideologies, while the most profound truths are often found in the ordinary dramas taking place around us. Life and death, hope and loss, beauty and cruelty all exist side by side.
Such is nature. Such is humanity. Such is the world.
The arrival of the rain made me think about another sort of change: the changes taking place in Britain.
Recently there has been much discussion surrounding the tenth anniversary of Brexit. I was surprised by the reaction to some of my own comments on the subject. Many people agreed, or at least sympathised with the view that Brexit has been one of the most damaging developments in modern British history. Others disagreed, but even among those who still support Brexit there seemed to be a widespread recognition that the country has experienced a period of extraordinary political instability since the referendum.
Prime Ministers have come and gone with remarkable speed. Governments have appeared powerful one moment and fragile the next. It is difficult not to wonder whether there is some connection between these events and the wider uncertainties that Britain has experienced during the last decade.
People often talk about leadership. Some leaders possess charisma but little wisdom. Others possess wisdom but little charisma. The ideal combination is rare. History shows us that governing a country requires far more than popularity or media presence, yet politics often rewards appearance more readily than competence.
The deeper question, however, concerns the structure of the political system itself.
Britain developed a parliamentary system that served the country reasonably well for a long time, but many people now question whether it remains adequate for a modern multi-party democracy. The House of Commons is still organised around a confrontational arrangement in which government and opposition literally face each other across a divide. It is a system built upon conflict and adversarial debate.
One sometimes wonders whether a more collaborative arrangement might better reflect the political realities of the twenty-first century. Instead of two opposing camps shouting across a chamber, perhaps a semicircular assembly, representing a spectrum of political views and encouraging negotiation and cooperation, would be more appropriate.
The electoral system raises similar questions. First-past-the-post was designed for a political landscape dominated by two major parties. Today’s Britain is far more diverse politically. Yet parliamentary representation often bears only a limited relationship to the actual distribution of votes across the country.
There was, of course, a referendum on electoral reform, and the public chose not to change the system at that time. Nevertheless, the debate continues because the underlying concerns have not disappeared.
Britain has a long tradition of political reform. The Great Reform Act of 1832 addressed the notorious rotten boroughs and improved representation. Further reforms expanded the electorate, gradually extending political participation to wider sections of society and eventually to women as well.

Yet perhaps the challenge today is not simply one of reform but of reimagining how representation itself should work in a modern democracy.
Then again, I often ask myself whether I really care about these matters anymore.
After all, I spend much of my life outside Britain. I am not a politician. I am not even especially interested in politics as a profession or a pastime. What concerns me is something much simpler: whether society can provide opportunity, dignity and a reasonable share of prosperity for ordinary people.
Political systems are ultimately only tools. Their purpose is not to serve themselves but to serve the people who live under them.
As I write this, however, the rain continues to fall gently outside. The air is cooler. The countryside looks refreshed. Nature has a remarkable ability to restore perspective.

The political arguments will continue tomorrow. The constitutional debates will continue tomorrow. The headlines will continue tomorrow.
But today has brought rain after heat, relief after discomfort, and a reminder that change is always possible, even when it seems unlikely.
Another page has been turned. Another day has been lived.
And who knows what tomorrow will bring?

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This 23 June 2026, it will be ten years since the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum — ten years since the United Kingdom made one of the most consequential and, it must now be said plainly, one of the most misguided decisions in its modern history.
This was not some overwhelming democratic mandate. It was a narrow result — 51.9% to 48.1% — secured in a campaign environment saturated with distortion, exaggeration, and promises that could not withstand even minimal scrutiny.

A decision of immense complexity was reduced to slogans. Voters were not equipped with clarity; they were fed certainty where none existed.
For those in London and other major cities, the result felt like a rupture with reality. The shock was not simply that Leave had won, but that it had done so on a basis so detached from the practical consequences that would inevitably follow. What emerged was not unity, but a fracture — within families, within communities, and across the country as a whole. Even with my own relatives and friends there were ruptures that time has hardly managed to heal.
The referendum may have been advisory, but it was treated as irreversible dogma. Parliament, fearful of the political consequences, chose compliance over scrutiny. Under Theresa May, the government triggered the Article 50 withdrawal process, and the country entered years of paralysis dressed up as process. This was not the execution of a clear plan; it was the slow exposure of the fact that no workable plan had ever truly existed.
The central claims of the Leave campaign have not survived contact with reality. The promise of regained control masked the loss of influence. The assurance of economic benefit gave way to increased friction and diminished ease of trade. The suggestion that public services would be enriched has not been borne out in any meaningful sense. What was presented as liberation has, in practice, often resembled self-imposed complication.
Perhaps most revealing was the behaviour of some British citizens living in Europe. Beneficiaries of EU rights — freedom of movement, ease of residence, reciprocal protections — they nevertheless voted to dismantle the very framework that sustained their lives. This was not rational calculation; it was identity politics in its purest form. Sovereignty was elevated above circumstance, sentiment above self-interest.

Ten years on, the consequences are no longer hypothetical. Freedom of movement is gone. Trade is more cumbersome. Barriers — bureaucratic, economic, and cultural — have multiplied. And yet the supposed compensations remain elusive. The gains that were promised have not materialised in any clear or convincing way.
Even legislative independence, so often invoked, has proved hollow in practice. Vast amounts of EU-derived law were retained because removing them would have caused chaos. The reality is stark: the United Kingdom has spent much of the past decade managing the damage of departure rather than enjoying its supposed freedoms.
Public opinion has shifted — and with good reason. There is now a growing recognition that Brexit was not a triumph of democratic will, but a failure of democratic judgement. While not unanimous, the movement of opinion is unmistakable: many who were promised certainty now see the cost of that illusion.

There is a broader lesson here, and it is an uncomfortable one. Democracies are not immune to manipulation. When complex issues are reduced to binary choices, when emotional appeal overrides factual grounding, the result is not empowerment but distortion. The comparison is not equivalence, but the mechanism is familiar — as seen, in very different and far more extreme circumstances, in moments like the 1933 German federal election, where rhetoric outpaced reality with catastrophic consequences.
Brexit is not that. But it belongs to the same category of error: a decision taken in confidence, sustained by belief, and later reconsidered in the light of experience.
The enduring problem is not simply that the decision was made, but that it has proved so difficult to question. A vote, once cast, acquired an almost untouchable status, as though democracy required not only that it be respected, but that it never be revisited — no matter how flawed the premises on which it rested.
Ten years later, the United Kingdom has not collapsed. But neither has it advanced in the way that was promised. Instead, it has been left navigating a more constrained, more complicated, and more uncertain position than before.
To say that Brexit was a mistake is no longer a controversial statement. It is an evidence-based one.
And the real indictment is this: it was a mistake that did not have to happen.

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Il 23 giugno 2026 ricorreranno dieci anni dal referendum del 2016 sull’appartenenza del Regno Unito all’Unione Europea: dieci anni da quando il Regno Unito prese una delle decisioni più importanti e, ormai bisogna dirlo apertamente, una delle più sbagliate della sua storia moderna.
Non si trattò di un mandato democratico schiacciante. Fu un risultato molto ristretto — 51,9% contro 48,1% — ottenuto in una campagna satura di distorsioni, esagerazioni e promesse che non avrebbero resistito nemmeno al più minimo esame critico.
Una decisione di enorme complessità fu ridotta a una serie di slogan. Agli elettori non fu offerta chiarezza; fu venduta una certezza laddove certezze non esistevano.
Per chi viveva a Londra e in altre grandi città, il risultato apparve come una frattura con la realtà. Lo shock non derivò soltanto dalla vittoria del Leave, ma dal fatto che essa fosse stata ottenuta su basi così scollegate dalle conseguenze pratiche che inevitabilmente sarebbero seguite. Ciò che emerse non fu l’unità, bensì una divisione: all’interno delle famiglie, delle comunità e dell’intero Paese. Anche tra i miei parenti e amici vi furono rotture che il tempo non è riuscito a sanare completamente.
Il referendum poteva essere consultivo, ma venne trattato come un dogma irreversibile. Il Parlamento, timoroso delle conseguenze politiche, scelse l’obbedienza invece dell’esame critico. Sotto Theresa May, il governo attivò l’Articolo 50 e il Paese entrò in anni di paralisi mascherata da procedura. Non si trattava dell’attuazione di un piano chiaro; era piuttosto la lenta rivelazione del fatto che un piano realmente praticabile non era mai esistito.
Le affermazioni centrali della campagna per il Leave non hanno resistito alla prova della realtà. La promessa di riprendere il controllo ha mascherato una perdita di influenza. Le assicurazioni di benefici economici hanno lasciato il posto a maggiori attriti e a una minore facilità negli scambi commerciali. L’idea che i servizi pubblici sarebbero stati rafforzati non si è concretizzata in alcun modo significativo. Ciò che venne presentato come una liberazione si è spesso tradotto, nella pratica, in una complicazione autoimposta.
Forse ancora più rivelatore è stato il comportamento di alcuni cittadini britannici residenti in Europa. Pur beneficiando dei diritti garantiti dall’Unione Europea — libertà di movimento, facilità di residenza e tutele reciproche — votarono comunque per smantellare il sistema che rendeva possibile la loro stessa vita. Non si trattò di un calcolo razionale, ma di politica dell’identità nella sua forma più pura. La sovranità venne elevata al di sopra delle circostanze concrete, il sentimento al di sopra dell’interesse personale.
Dieci anni dopo, le conseguenze non sono più ipotetiche. La libertà di movimento è scomparsa. Il commercio è diventato più complesso. Le barriere — burocratiche, economiche e culturali — si sono moltiplicate. Eppure i presunti vantaggi restano sfuggenti. I benefici promessi non si sono materializzati in modo chiaro o convincente.
Anche l’indipendenza legislativa, così spesso evocata, si è rivelata in gran parte illusoria. Una vasta quantità di norme derivanti dall’Unione Europea è stata mantenuta perché eliminarla avrebbe provocato il caos. La realtà è evidente: il Regno Unito ha trascorso gran parte dell’ultimo decennio a gestire i danni dell’uscita piuttosto che a godere delle libertà che essa avrebbe dovuto garantire.
L’opinione pubblica è cambiata, e per buone ragioni. Vi è oggi una crescente consapevolezza che la Brexit non sia stata un trionfo della volontà democratica, ma un fallimento del giudizio democratico. Pur non essendo unanime, il cambiamento dell’opinione pubblica è inconfondibile: molti di coloro ai quali era stata promessa la certezza vedono ora il costo di quell’illusione.
Vi è anche una lezione più ampia, e scomoda. Le democrazie non sono immuni dalla manipolazione. Quando questioni complesse vengono ridotte a scelte binarie, quando l’appello alle emozioni prevale sui fatti, il risultato non è l’emancipazione dei cittadini ma la distorsione del processo democratico. Il paragone non è di equivalenza, ma il meccanismo è familiare: lo si è visto, in circostanze molto diverse e ben più estreme, anche in momenti come le elezioni federali tedeshe del 1933, quando la retorica superò la realtà con conseguenze catastrofiche.
La Brexit non è questo. Ma appartiene alla stessa categoria di errore: una decisione presa con fiducia, sostenuta dalla convinzione e successivamente rivalutata alla luce dell’esperienza.
Il problema più duraturo non è semplicemente che quella decisione sia stata presa, ma che sia stato così difficile metterla in discussione. Un voto, una volta espresso, ha acquisito uno status quasi intoccabile, come se la democrazia richiedesse non soltanto il rispetto del risultato, ma anche che esso non potesse mai essere riesaminato, indipendentemente dalla fragilità delle premesse su cui si fondava.
Dieci anni dopo, il Regno Unito non è crollato. Ma non ha nemmeno avanzato i progressi che erano stati promessi. Si trova invece a navigare una posizione più limitata, più complessa e più incerta di quella che occupava in precedenza.
Affermare che la Brexit sia stata un errore non è più una dichiarazione controversa. È una conclusione basata sulle evidenze.
E la vera accusa è questa: si è trattato di un errore che non avrebbe dovuto accadere.

There is a point around the summer solstice when the evenings stop behaving normally. The light simply does not leave when it should. Living near Bagni di Lucca you notice it first in the hills — chestnut woods holding onto the day, paths that feel slightly longer, as if time itself has loosened its structure. It is not dramatic, but it is persistent: the sense that the day is not quite finished, even when it should be. At its simplest, it is just the apotheosis of full summer — clear air, steady and often intolerable heat, long light from morning to night. But at midsummer it feels more charged, as if the landscape is briefly more aware of itself. I once wrote of it as “the year’s turning point… eternal love embracing in nature’s magic.” That still feels accurate: a moment where change is happening even while everything appears still. At such times, Shakespeare feels less like literature and more like atmosphere. A Midsummer Night’s Dream fits easily here, as if the forest itself were slightly theatrical, perception loosening at the edges.

There is a place in our region where this becomes almost physical. At Monte Forato — the natural arch above the Apuan Alps — the sun passes through the opening at sunset, disappears, reappears, then finally sinks. It feels like a brief interruption in certainty itself. When I crossed the exposed ridge it felt steady but below my wife called out in alarm, watching every step as if it were far more dangerous than it felt. That gap between experience and perception has stayed with me: the same moment, completely different realities.

Midsummer here is also shaped by encounters and local memory. I remember a night spent in convivial company with a “white witch” I met while teaching English at the local school. It carried that same sense of loosened boundaries between the ordinary and the slightly mythic that belongs to this season.

Around Prato Fiorito there is also the memory of fire-walking events — organised with the help of our chemist — where people crossed embers in the night air. It felt less like spectacle than ritual: heat, courage, and community condensed into a single threshold crossed on foot.

And beneath all of this is the older layer of St John’s Eve, San Giovanni — herbs gathered at night, water and dew at dawn, fire as both protection and celebration. Even when not explicitly observed, it still feels embedded in the rhythm of the place, as if this part of the year has always been understood as a crossing.

There are also simpler memories: the first clear summer days when everything stabilises, sunrise to sunset uninterrupted, the world briefly coherent again after seasonal uncertainty. And then, almost unnoticed, the sense that this peak is already a turning — that from here, the light begins to withdraw.

Not all of it is celebratory. The earthquake of 21 June 2013 in the Lucido valley just across from us – where we would participate in the living Christmas crib at Equi Terme – remains part of this season as a counterpoint — the same extraordinary light, but fractured by something sudden and real. It reminds you that midsummer is not only brightness, but instability contained within brightness.

What remains, though, is the feeling of extended light that refuses to end properly. Even when the sun goes, the evening continues as if nothing has finished. You only realise later that the turning point has already passed.

And that, in these hills of northern Tuscany, is what midsummer becomes: not a festival of light, but the moment light quietly begins to turn back on itself.

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Sometimes it is too cold to go out. That is often the case in England, and occasionally in Italy too. But just as often it is the opposite: the heat becomes too heavy to resist.
Recently we have been living through one of those spells when, between late morning and mid-afternoon, the air thickens to the point where only “mad dogs and Englishmen”, to borrow the old song, would willingly walk into the glare of the noonday sun.

So I retreated, as I often do, into the lowest part of the house.

In Italy, the cellar—the cantina—is where summer is briefly held at bay. It is a space of cool stone and still air, a kind of domestic underground where even the cats disappear when the heat becomes unendurable. It has become, over time, a private refuge: a place where the day slows down enough to think.

It was there, quite by chance, that I noticed several old suitcases.
They had been sitting untouched for years. Dust had softened their edges; time had gathered on their surfaces like a second skin. They were not hidden so much as forgotten in plain sight.

Curiosity, that persistent and mildly indiscreet force, drew me in.
The first suitcase was almost apologetic in its contents: spare parts for vacuum cleaners, small domestic fragments of no particular story. Useful once, now merely residual.
The second carried a different kind of residue. Teaching notes. Papers from English lessons taught in Italy, and from courses long before that in England. Lesson plans, academic scribbles, the scaffolding of days that once felt structured and necessary, now collapsed into paper.
Then came the third suitcase.
And with it, a different temperature altogether.
Letters.
Not recent ones, but correspondence reaching back to 1970, 1971, 1972 and beyond. Letters from friends, family, colleagues, travelling companions—people who once populated the ordinary landscape of life, and who now exist, for the most part, only in memory.
Postcards from journeys. Notes written in transit. Conversations stretched across distance and time, concerned with plans, misunderstandings, affections, departures, returns. All the small urgencies that once felt permanent.

And then the question arrived, quietly but insistently:
What is one supposed to do with this?
The difficulty is not merely practical. It is moral in a minor key.
Some letters are difficult because their authors are no longer alive. Reading them is a peculiar act of resurrection: voices briefly returning through ink and paper, only to withdraw again into absence. The effect is almost physical. One is momentarily in their company, and then, just as suddenly, alone.
Other letters are difficult for another reason entirely. The writers may still be alive, but the worlds those letters describe have dissolved. What was once urgent now feels fragile; what was once unresolved may now be unmentionable. To read them is to risk reopening rooms that have long since been closed, not out of indifference, but out of necessity.
So the choices appear simple, though none of them are.
Keep them.
Discard them.
Destroy them.
Many people choose destruction. My own mother did so with regularity, burning letters as if flame were a kind of final punctuation. In literary history there are more dramatic examples still: archives lost to fire, to prudence, to the desire not to leave traces. Even Byron’s papers were not spared the logic of removal. What disappears does so completely.
Perhaps that is a kind of mercy.
But it is also an ending without return.
In our own time, the same dilemma persists in a less visible form. Paper has largely given way to the digital. Emails, messages, files—an invisible archive that grows without weight or smell. Yet the underlying question remains unchanged. What do we keep of ourselves once the moment has passed?
Occasionally I encounter old emails that belong to earlier versions of life, as though they were written by someone adjacent to me but not entirely identical. The question returns with quiet persistence: is this necessary? Or merely accumulated residue?
And yet there is always the counterweight of history.
We read the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn with a sense of intimacy across centuries. We treasure fragments of correspondence that survived not because they were intended for us, but because they were not destroyed. Those writers, of course, had no awareness that their private worlds would one day become public textures of understanding.
It is here that another thought begins to emerge.
We are often reluctant to throw away photographs, especially family photographs, because they seem to preserve not only moments but relationships. Faces that may later become difficult to reconstruct. Places that no longer exist in the same form. Even the most ordinary image becomes, over time, a kind of evidence.
And one begins to wonder whether descendants might not, in fact, find these materials more interesting than we do. Not because they are more important to us, but because they become history to them. What feels ordinary to one generation becomes archaeology to the next.
Photographs and letters, in that sense, are both time machines. They do not simply preserve the past; they reanimate it, though always imperfectly, always with distortion.
There are even cases where such discoveries have altered the understanding of well-known figures. Suitcases, quite literally, reappearing after decades, have contained letters that reshaped biographical narratives and forced reinterpretations of creative lives. One thinks, for instance, of material connected with the composer Giacomo Puccini, where correspondence discovered in private archives cast new light on aspects of his personal relationships and the emotional background to works such as La Fanciulla del West. What had seemed settled was reopened; what had been fixed became provisional again.
It is a reminder that the past is never fully closed. It is only temporarily arranged.j
Of course, I do not assume that my own papers belong to anything other than the ordinary. And yet the ordinary, too, becomes a form of evidence when enough time has passed. Not evidence of greatness, but of existence: how life was organised, how it was felt, how it unfolded in its unremarkable continuity.
Still, standing in the cellar among the suitcases, the question is not historical. It is personal.
What presses most is not the existence of the papers, but their accumulation. The sense that time itself has been stored, folded, and left waiting.
The letters behave like small instruments of transport. To open one is to be displaced: suddenly elsewhere, suddenly someone else, suddenly confronted with a version of oneself that no longer exists except as residue.
This is their gift, and also their burden.
So perhaps the answer lies neither in preservation nor in destruction, but in something slower and less absolute.
To begin by saving them from damp and neglect.
To give them time again—air, light, attention.
To approach them not as a mass to be resolved, but as a series of encounters.
Some will remain.
Some will not.
Some will be read once more and then allowed to recede, not erased, but released.
The suitcases have already survived half a century. They are in no hurry.
First they return to dryness in the Tuscan light, their contents quieting after years of sealed darkness.
Then, perhaps, I will return to them in the early hours, when the heat has not yet gathered and the day still belongs to possibility rather than obligation.
The past does not ask to be abolished.
But neither does it ask to be inhabited forever.
And perhaps the real work is simply this: to let it exist without allowing it to eclipse the present it once made possible.

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Yesterday’s news from Ukraine again affected me deeply. To say that I was shocked is perhaps not quite the right word. Any decent person is shocked by the suffering and destruction caused by war. Yet there was something particularly distressing about hearing reports of damage to sacred buildings in Kyiv, because these were places that I had visited with Sandra during a much happier period in that country’s history in 2005 and we had truly appreciated those golden domes.

Among them was the Cathedral of the Dormition. The word “Dormition” is the Eastern Orthodox term describing the death of the Virgin Mary, literally her “falling asleep” before her assumption into heaven. This is not a different religion from Christianity but another expression of the same Christian faith and tradition.

What makes the situation especially tragic is that this conflict is taking place between peoples who share the same Eastern orthodox religious and cultural inheritance. We are not speaking of entirely different civilizations confronting one another. We are speaking of peoples who share saints, traditions, sacred places, and centuries of common history. One naturally hopes that religious leaders will seek reconciliation and understanding, for the purpose of faith should surely be to build bridges rather than deepen divisions.

The news brought back vivid memories of my visit to the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra in 2005. The reception I received throughout Ukraine was warm and friendly, yet I remember one curious incident while visiting the underground cave monasteries. As I followed the usual route through the tunnels, a monk addressed me sharply and, through a woman who translated for me, made it clear that he wished me to leave that particular area. I was puzzled because I had done nothing unusual and was simply following the path taken by other visitors.

At the time I found the encounter unsettling. Looking back, I still cannot explain it. Yet it remains fixed in my memory because it occurred in such a profoundly spiritual setting. What I remember most vividly, however, is emerging once more into the daylight from those ancient underground passages. The monastery had survived centuries of upheaval, invasions, revolutions, and political turmoil. Today one can only hope that those caves continue to offer refuge and protection to those who need them.

The events in Ukraine have also led me to reflect on the wider destruction of cultural heritage in wartime. During my gap year in 1967, I travelled widely and had the privilege of visiting Baalbek in Lebanon. Even after all these years, I can still remember the immense scale and grandeur of its Roman temples. They were among the most impressive monuments of the ancient world that I had ever seen. Standing among such ruins, one becomes aware that they belong not merely to a particular nation but to the whole of humanity.

That is why the destruction of cultural heritage during war is so painful. Factories can be rebuilt. Roads and bridges can be reconstructed. Houses can eventually be replaced. But monuments, churches, monasteries, temples, and historic buildings embody centuries of memory, craftsmanship, and faith. Once damaged, something irreplaceable is lost.

Long before aerial warfare became a reality, H.G. Wells explored its possibilities in his remarkable 1908 novel The War in the Air. The original military purpose of bombing was to destroy an enemy’s industrial and military capacity. Yet bombing soon acquired another purpose: the destruction of morale. It became a weapon directed not only at factories and transport systems but also at the symbols that people held most dear.

For most people, the most cherished possession is their home. Beyond that are the places that embody a nation’s memory and identity: churches, cathedrals, monuments, libraries, and historic buildings. During the Second World War, St Paul’s Cathedral became a symbol of Britain’s endurance during the Blitz. Churchill understood that if St Paul’s were destroyed, something more than a building would be lost. The image of its dome rising above the smoke became a symbol of national resilience.

The same principle can be seen elsewhere. Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was left partially in ruins as a reminder of war’s devastation. For decades the Frauenkirche in Dresden which I motorbiked to in 2001stood as a shattered monument to destruction before eventually being rebuilt. Significantly, many of those who contributed to its reconstruction came from countries that had once been enemies . The rebuilt church became a symbol not only of restoration but also of reconciliation.

What saddens me most is that the destruction of cultural heritage is an attack not only upon the present but also upon the past and the future. It severs the link between generations. It attempts to erase memory itself.

Yet history also offers grounds for hope. Coventry Cathedral, Warsaw’s Old Town, Monte Cassino, and the Frauenkirche all demonstrate that destruction need not have the final word. Communities endure. Memory survives. Buildings can rise again.

As I reflect upon the latest news from Ukraine, I find myself hoping that the same spirit of restoration and reconciliation will one day prevail there. The scars of war may remain visible for generations, but so too can the determination to preserve what is best in human civilization.

In the end, the true significance of a cathedral, a monastery, or an ancient temple lies not merely in stone and mortar but in what it represents: the continuity of human memory against the forces that seek to destroy it.

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There is a wonderful moment in Fawlty Towers when Basil, lamenting the restrictions imposed by his formidable wife Sybil, sighs, “Well, even that avenue of pleasure has been closed to me.”
The phrase has stayed with me over the years. As one grows older, one becomes aware that certain avenues of pleasure do indeed close, regardless of wives. Some disappear gradually, others abruptly. Yet life is not simply a matter of closures. While some roads become inaccessible, others open unexpectedly, sometimes widening into grand boulevards and ceremonial avenues that we could never have imagined in our youth.
When I look back over my life, one particular avenue of pleasure stands out above all others: life on two wheels.
My love affair with two-wheeled transport began, as it does for so many people, with a bicycle. I still remember the moment when my father decided that the stabilisers had to come off. He ran behind me in the park, holding the bicycle steady while I wobbled uncertainly forward. Then, after a while, I glanced over my shoulder and discovered that he was nowhere near me. He had let go long before. I was cycling entirely on my own.
That moment was freedom.
From then on, London became my playground. In those days the roads seemed friendlier and the traffic less intimidating. I cycled everywhere. By my early teens I was venturing considerable distances simply to satisfy my curiosity. I remember riding all the way to St Albans along Watling Street because I wanted to know where the ancient road went. Not long afterwards I cycled to Cambridge, years before I would eventually become a student there.
At school, the bicycle sheds formed a small universe of their own. At Dulwich College they were places of conversation, occasional mischief, the odd argument, and the sort of adventures that seemed enormously important at the time. Today they have largely disappeared, victims perhaps of changing times and changing traffic conditions, but they remain vivid in my memory.
My bicycle accompanied me through university as well. Cambridge and its surrounding villages were made for cycling. Barrington, Shelford and countless other villages lay within easy reach, connected by lanes that invited exploration. Looking back, I realise that I was never cycling merely to get somewhere. The journey itself was always part of the pleasure.
The bicycle remained central even after university. During my working life in London I often commuted by bike. To save money on travel fares when I was training and teaching, I would cycle extraordinary distances, sometimes from Woolwich all the way across the capital to Wimbledon or Richmond. Looking back now, I can scarcely believe the energy I possessed.
One day, while riding through Camberwell Green, I was overtaken by a familiar face. It was Paul McCartney, who gave me an encouraging smile and a cheerful comment as I pedalled on. It was one of those wonderfully improbable London moments that remain fixed in the memory.
Cycling was not merely practical. It was also one of the great pleasures I shared with my wife. Taking advantage of discounted rail tickets, we would travel with our bicycles to different parts of Britain and spend days exploring. Dorset, Somerset, Norfolk, Cambridge, Brighton, Corfe Castle, Lulworth Cove—places that revealed themselves at the perfect pace for two cyclists. Fast enough to cover distance, slow enough to appreciate every detail.

Yet eventually I discovered another form of two-wheeled freedom.
My first motorcycle was a rather unreliable Villiers Ambassador passed on by my brother. It spent almost as much time breaking down as it did moving. My first proper machine was a Honda CB250. Some people advised me to buy the larger 360 model, but the 250 was quite sufficient for me.

That motorcycle became part of my life story. I courted my future wife on it. It carried us through the early years of marriage. Most importantly, it taught me something that every motorcyclist knows: for moving through a city, there is nothing quite like two wheels. Cars sit in traffic. Trains follow fixed routes. A motorcycle feels alive.
What I also discovered was the remarkable camaraderie of motorcycling. Car drivers often regard one another as obstacles. Motorcyclists regard one another as companions. There is an unspoken fraternity. A raised leg, a nod, a wave—small gestures acknowledging a shared understanding of freedom and risk.
Years later, in 1997, I returned seriously to motorcycling with a Honda Transalp 600. It was a hybrid machine, equally at home on roads and rough tracks. Some enthusiasts dismiss such motorcycles as compromises, but for me it was perfect.
The Transalp transformed travel.
I rode it through Wales, into the Berwyn Hills, along forest tracks and mountain roads. Then came a far greater adventure. Crossing first to the Channel Islands to meet my wife for a camping holiday, I continued alone through France and over some of the highest Alpine passes in Europe before descending into Italy.
The motorcycle proved ideal for Tuscany. On sweltering summer days I could simply climb higher and higher into the mountains, escaping the heat and discovering another world among forests, villages and mountain roads. It was one of the most exhilarating periods of my life.

Of course, motorcycling has its own intoxicating pleasures. On the long, empty roads of northern France, there were occasional moments when the speedometer climbed past one hundred miles an hour. Motorcyclists have a name for that sensation. We used to call it “tunnelling up.” At such speeds the world narrows and stretches simultaneously. The landscape streams towards you. Time itself seems to accelerate. Any thought of danger vanishes completely, replaced by a feeling that borders on flight.
Eventually, however, my beloved red-and-white Transalp was stolen after I returned to London. I was devastated.
Yet my affection for the machine remained strong, and before long I acquired another Transalp, this one an olive-green model equipped with disc brakes front and rear.
That second motorcycle carried me on another unforgettable journey, this time across Germany and into Eastern Europe.
A violent thunderstorm greeted me in Germany, but the weather soon cleared and I continued eastward. Unlike my earlier trip, this journey was shaped as much by music as by geography.
One morning I arrived in Leipzig and entered the church containing Johann Sebastian Bach’s tomb. The experience remains among the most profound of my life. The church was almost empty. There were no crowds, no ceremonies, no performances. Only a cleaning woman quietly dusting Bach’s memorial slab.
For decades Bach’s music had accompanied me. To stand there at last, in silence, before his resting place, was overwhelming. It felt as though I had arrived not merely at a destination but at the source of a lifelong inspiration.

From Leipzig I followed other musical trails: Handel, Schumann, and eventually Chopin in Warsaw.
Poland itself was fascinating. I remember roads that rose and dipped gently across marshy landscapes, and endless forests where, in the middle of nowhere, a solitary table might appear beside the road with a young woman selling freshly gathered mushrooms.
Warsaw was memorable for another reason. Having found a campsite, I later became completely unable to find it again. I spent hours circling the city searching for my tent, unable to remember the name of the campsite and utterly defeated by Polish pronunciation.
Further south, Kraków made a deep impression, not least because of its proximity to Auschwitz. To visit the beauty of the city and then confront the industrialised horror of the camp was a powerful reminder of the extremes of human civilisation.
I had hoped to continue onwards into Russia, but circumstances made that impossible. Nevertheless, the journey gave me a vivid sense of Eastern Europe at a moment when much of it still felt undiscovered by Western tourism.
When I eventually settled in Italy, motorcycles gave way to scooters. In Italy, scooters are not merely vehicles; they are part of everyday life. Mine carried me all over Tuscany. It transported me to schools, businesses, factories and private lessons. Occasionally I treated it as if it were an off-road machine, which was not always wise, but it served me faithfully for many years.
The scooter still exists.
The motorcycles are gone.

And now, approaching my eightieth year, I find myself asking whether this particular avenue of pleasure has finally closed.
The practical argument is obvious enough. My wife is an excellent driver. A modern car is warmer, safer and more comfortable. The risks of motorcycling increase with age. Reflexes slow. Bones become less forgiving. Common sense begins to speak more loudly.
Yet when I look back, I do not feel regret.
I feel gratitude.
I was extraordinarily fortunate. Across decades of cycling and motorcycling, I escaped serious injury. I travelled where I wished to travel. I crossed mountains, countries and cultures. I saw landscapes that remain vivid in my memory. I reached places that mattered deeply to me. I courted my wife on two wheels. I stood before Bach’s tomb. I explored Europe under my own power.
Many people reach old age mourning adventures they never had.
I have been lucky enough to have had mine.
Perhaps, then, the question is not whether the avenue has closed. Perhaps the better question is whether the journey itself has ended.
And the answer is clearly no.
The boy cycling to discover where Watling Street led, the young man crossing Europe on a motorcycle, and the older man reflecting on those experiences today are all driven by the same impulse: curiosity.
The desire to see what lies beyond the next bend.
The vehicle changes. Sometimes it is a bicycle. Sometimes it is a motorcycle. Sometimes it is a car driven by a beloved companion. Sometimes it is nothing more than memory, music and imagination.
But the journey continues.
As long as there remains another road to notice, another piece of music to hear, another landscape to admire, another book to read, another conversation to enjoy, another question to ask, life continues to open fresh avenues.
Some pleasures close. Others arrive.
The important thing is not the vehicle.
The important thing is to keep moving, to keep seeing, to keep living, and above all, to keep being.

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.