This March I will have been ten years in Girona. Now even living somewhere I still consider to be my perfect place I have started to look for improvements to my annual calendar - during July and August it really is better to be elsewhere. While up in the Pyrenees is great for a five day break from 38 centigrade with extra humidity, it doesn’t quite come up to the summer at a lakeside retreat of a 19^th century composer I have a hankering after. Ideas about being at the far end of a Norwegian fjord have crossed my tiny mind. More practicably I’m coming round to an island in the Baltic with boat access into Stockholm should I need to get to an Opera House quick, or some other emergency.

Which just leaves me January, February and March to deal with, I already go to Dubai in February, though that’s work related, so it’s about fitting in some me time around that. The Seychelles are only a four hour flight from Dubai though my jury is still out on tropical islands - I’m not sure I actually like them on the basis of last year having been to one.

Las Palmas in Grand Canaria might work if I forget about the Indian Ocean. It’s not a triangle in the Franz Liszt, Weimar, Rome, Budapest, Weimar manner, but I’m okay with keeping Girona as my hub, having gone to all the effort of becoming officially resident. I’ll see how things develop. Places will still need to be visited outside of any lengthier stop-overs, Berlin and Prague in Central Europe spring to mind, which isn’t to forget Lisbon, of places I’ve never been but want to go to - Istanbul, and Buenos Aires, I’d be interested to see if the people there really are as crazy as I hope they are, but I’ve become more sensitive to nasty regimes as I’ve got older, which I now is the wrong way round.