That there was some prospect of Justin playing the role of a responsible elder brother, and leaving school with the A-Levels necessary for him to go to university in the UK, was something of a relief.

His period at Bootham, which had at times been so difficult and exhausting to support, had not been without serious term-time incidents. Indeed at one point I was convinced the headmaster was trying to assemble an incriminating file on the basis of which Justin might be expelled. Yet Justin himself was positive and cheerful for the most part, and I began to find him a most interesting and congenial companion for outings to the cinema and exhibitions.

One of our happiest outings was in the Easter holiday of his last year at school when on a glorious warm and sunny day we took the train from Brussels to Amsterdam to visit the exhibition curated under the title “La Grande Parade” at the Stedelijk Museum. We both loved the show and afterwards sat in the sun for a drink at a table outside one of the cafes on a busy pedestrian street.

There are times when there is nothing nicer than to watch the world go by. How right Justin was when he summed up the sense of freedom there by saying: “You know you could walk down this street with an axe dripping blood and no one would say anything.”

That Amsterdam exhibition visit somehow crystallised in my mind a lot of the thinking stimulated by the previous years’ film and painting courses. For the rest of the eighties my spare time interest would be focussed on the graphic arts. The nature of my Commission work would allow me to pursue some of my more extravagant ideas.

The first concrete expression of my renewed graphic-arts enthusiasm was a draft article I submitted to the London Review of Books and the Irish Arts Review for possible publication. While it received a polite expression of interest from the Commission’s Spokesman, Hugo Paemen, who, I felt, should see it, in case it might be accepted for publication, it did not win the approval of either of the two editors to whom it had been sent.

1985 brought in the first Delors Commission, with Peter Sutherland as the member from Ireland. I remained in the Spokesman’s Service. Not initially invited to act as the Sutherland Spokesman, I became responsible for the monitoring of press and news agency coverage.

An advantage of that responsibility was that while I had an early morning start, the rest of my time during the day was more structured than if I been continuing as a dossier Spokesman – except on those weekends when I shared in permanence duties.

This was also a year in which we seemed to welcome lots of visitors to Brussels.

There was a worrying time between these visits when Anne became seriously ill with a kidney infection. Thanks to the care of our new woman GP, Dr. Paschal, who was to become the doctor and friend of the whole family, she did not have to go to hospital, but it was a close call.

To help her convalescence we found at short notice a holiday package offering a week in Dubrovnik. What a great week we had. Beautiful weather and a sea-view room in the Excelsior Hotel, where Churchill and royalty had stayed. It was an easy walk to the walled city and our bedroom view included the harbour and the city.

We lay in the sun and read and swam in the sea or the hotel pool. There were concerts available almost every evening in a church, a convent and a music school. The city’s famous flagged main street and narrow alleys seemed magical, with an architecture which owed much to the long Venetian occupation. There were, however, obvious tensions among the hotel staff and management, which seemed to go much deeper than poor organisation.

The city museum almost seemed provocative in its presentation of sieges and historic confrontations between different ethnic groups. While it was depressing, a few years later, to see the subsequent destruction of the Excelsior in the ‘90s confrontation between Croats, Serbs and Bosnians, it was not a surprise to find Dubrovnik on the frontline in the collapse of Yugoslavia.

Read more: 1986 – A Database and a Festival