New Year's Eve.

Romanesque: a style, and a particular way of feeling European and of existing in the wider cultural and historic orbit of Rome. For me, a gallery of images stetching in time from my childhood and including (to take only the first things that spring to mind) the two carved stone panels from Chichester cathedral, the carvings of Gislebertus in Autun, the Bury St Edmunds ivory crucifix in the Cloisters gallery in New York, the great font at Lucca, Barfreston church in Kent, a carved stone head in Bedford Museum, the little church at Coombes in Sussex. Places and things which (like music) evoke a steady stream of memories of the most intense pleasure, cohering my sense of self and of belonging in the world. Like the sense of Roman ruins beneath the streets of the city where I live, an old city which has ben levelled many times and risen again from the ashes, like all the old cities of Europe which share the habit of survival.

The high-points of my 2007 - a trip to New York just before the spring broke, a pilgrimage to Italy, a holiday in Pesaro. Stubbs' zebra in the loan show from Yale at the Royal Academy; visits to Gloucester and Warwick; Amy Winehouse at the Brixton Academy; Rickie Lee Jones at the Jazz Cafe; Eartha Kitt at 80 at the Shaw Theatre singing 'Here's To Life'; reading 'Hester Lilly' by Elizabeth Taylor; seeing old friends.