It was a month after I left Oxford that I arrived in Baarn, about twenty-two miles south-east of Amsterdam, to start my first job. I rented a room in a lodging-house about five minutes by bicycle from Hoog Wolde, the rather palatial building that housed PPI—Philips Phonografische Industrie. My office, however, was in the Koetshuis, or Coach House, an outbuilding in the grounds. I've always had a physique that is somehow immune to cold: I usually kept my window open, even in the depths of the Dutch winter, so my office rapidly came to be known as the Icebox, and colleagues who planned to come across from the main building to discuss a project would call an hour in advance and ask me to warm the place up for their arrival.

My immediate predecessor was Conrad Wilson, who served subsequently for many years as music critic of the Scotsman. He helped to ease me into the linguistic demands of a first job abroad by taking me around the various shops he frequented in Baarn and insisting to their staff members that they should speak only Dutch with me. This deep-end approach to the language served me well: after only two or three weeks I managed to order a complete meal in an Amsterdam restaurant without speaking—or forcing the waiter to speak—a single word of English.

Through Conrad I got to know Carli van Emde Boas, a graphic designer, formerly with Philips, who had left to go into the world of public relations. Carli was a multitalented man who played drums in a jazz band but was also a lover of early music, and especially of the English lutesong school of composers. In the following years, on our way to meals in and around Amsterdam in his car, we would oft en pass the time singing Dowland or Campion, or sometimes English folk song, he in a cultivated countertenor and I in my low bass. Carli is another of the friends from those days with whom I have stayed in touch. I still receive his New- Year's greeting cards every year, and never cease to marvel at the way he can devise, every time, a creative and oft en amusing graphic treatment of the numbers in question.