Our young guests have indeed been having fun. This afternoon I loaned them the head of my secretariat, Miguel Colera, to act as the Secretary General in their simulated plenary session. As I handed him over, at Vice-President Anna Maria Darmanin’s invitation, I said a few words about what Europe meant for me. I used the parallel of two World Cup finals that I very much enjoyed. One, in 1966, saw England win at home. The other, in 1982, saw Italy win in Spain but, at the time, I was living and studying in my adoptive Italy. In both cases I remember the thrill and the joy of those final matches and victories. But – here’s the rub – in 1966 I watched on a black-and-white screen within a small wooden box, the image constantly blurred or obscured by ‘interference’. If somebody had asked me to watch the 1982 match on such a box I would have been bemused and frustrated. Europe to me, I argued, was like colour television. It was fun. And the miracle of working in the EU is that although those colours and cultures remain bright and vivid, nationalities disappear.