Radek Sikorski

There was hardly an election poster to be seen on the roadside during a two-hour drive from London to the country. The British do not appreciate this miracle. In Poland five days before an election, every other fence would be disfigured with photoshopped faces. Our lovely lunch hosts seemed resigned to the coming Red Terror: a purge of the remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, a new relationship with the European Union, inheritance taxes. I tried to cheer them up with a piece of Central European wisdom: there is always time for a magnum of champagne between the revolution and the firing squad.

Strasbourg Europhobes will never have a better argument against European integration than the seat of the European parliament in Strasbourg. It’s not just the €200 million per year it costs to move MEPs to and from Brussels once a month at great inconvenience to everyone; the building itself is a disgrace. It feels like a prison: identical glass corridors look out over a useless inner courtyard, so you can go on walks without the danger of escape. The former president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso once suggested turning the building into the headquarters of the European Institute of Technology, which was an excellent offer both for the country and the city, but to no avail.

My wife laughs that my love of gadgets is a remnant of my Communist upbringing, when western toys were objects of veneration. A couple of days ago, I found myself on a Lufthansa flight over the Atlantic indulging precisely that love: using an app, I could see live pictures of our house in rural Poland via the security cameras. I could also check that the alarm is on, heating system off and the new photovoltaic farm is producing more energy than the house is consuming. I suppose that’s the consumerist heaven we fought for in those days, just as much as for freedom and democracy. Back in Boston, I am reminded why I prefer museums created by the whim of a millionaire to those assembled by committees.

As the BA flight from Warsaw landed at Heathrow, I felt a little tremor of anxiety, though it wasn’t anything to do with fear of flying. I was here for the Pembroke College gaudy. I had never attended a reunion before, and I had doubts about it. What if the people I really liked didn’t show up? What if I didn’t remember somebody’s name, while they remembered me? Above all, did I really want to see a bunch of old people claiming to be my contemporaries? It turned out to be a delight.

I made a welcome escape from sweltering Warsaw to the cloudy cool of Bodø, halfway up the coast of Norway, north of Iceland. Bodø’s harbour stays ice-free all year round only thanks to the Gulf Stream. The fjords bubble with whirlpools and offer some of the best cold-water scuba diving in the world. When the mist clears, the air in this visibly prosperous place has an Alpine, colour-enhancing quality. It’s my first time beyond the Arctic circle and the dusk through the night makes it hard to sleep. ‘Now imagine,’ says the wife over the phone from Washington, ‘what it was like to try to go to sleep in a Soviet-era hotel in Vorkuta, in late June, without curtains.