At midday I took two friends, one a composer and one a musician, down to the border country between the Famenne and the Ardenne regions in search of a venue for a concert. We started off at a village church but concluded that the acoustics just wouldn’t work. We then went to a wooden construction built by a religious community of monks and nuns. Sister Agnes proudly showed us around a massive wooden hall that serves as a church in the summer and a cow barn in the winter. The space and acoustics were right, but it would have been impossible to heat the barn (the concert is planned for October). Sister Agnes took us to the community’s chapel and there picked up a Kora (an African harp) and began to play it for us. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful spot. Birds twittered outside and we could hear the brothers finishing the lunchtime washing up. It was a beautiful moment. The radiant and joyful hospitality of the community, the sense of well-being among our hosts, their pride in the well-stacked firewood and the buildings they had all built or restored themselves, Sister Agnes’s harp playing and Mother Nature putting on a blinder of a day, the good company of my friends – it was just the tops.