The closer I got to my birthday last week the more I felt like taking time out to think.
So I got on a plane and went to visit the home of my memories
 I flew to Innsbruck . That’s where I went to university and spent most of the 1980s.
There is something about being surrounded by mountains all the time. It’s like having a scaffolding that supports you and breaths life into your dreams.
During my years in Innsbruck, the mountains where always there… taller than any building in town.
And they were there for me when I landed on Friday. The Nordkette looks like an immaculate embrace of shining beauty. I know every peak. I would look at them every time I took a break from my books and stared out of the window of my studio. I know they were looking after me.
On Saturday, I was skiing down a mountain with old friends, when one of them pointed out in the distance what used to be a NATO listening station on the Italian side of the Alps.
That’s the Austria I used to live in. Sandwiched between the West and Eastern Europe. The East was a place we did not understand and we all feared to death.
I lived under the spell of Cold War mythology. Vienna had the highest concentration of spies in Europe and Czechoslovakia (where I worked in the 1990s… ) might as well have been a place near Vega…. 25  light-years from Earth.
The more I travel around the world the more I need to come back and look at Innsbruck’s mountains.
Before boarding the plane back to London today, I blew a kiss to the building where I had my last written exam and looked up… I know the mountains will stay with me for ever.
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Innsbruck sounds lovely!