This picture of me was taken by Dan in Barcelona. Early next week I am off to Madrid then Rome, and if I wanted to I could easily slip over to France virtually any time I like. Indeed, when I was a PhD student at the University of Sussex we used to do just that. A couple of us would get on an old bucket of a ferry in Newhaven (just up the road from here) with cheap tickets given away by The Argus. We used to work on the way over - reading each other extracts from our PhDs and discussing what we were doing before having a good lunch in Dieppe. Its easy to take these things for granted, being able to do what we like is one of the luxuries of being a baby boomer. But it would be churlish to forget what happened in the ten years before I was born, that allowed this freedom we now have. My own family, those who survived the war on both my mother and father's side, are slowly leaving us. It doesn't feel a time to regret but to remember and to acknowledge the freedom we now have as a result - throw those curtains wide, one day like this...
