[Music]
There certain things I can't live without beyond the obvious ones.
[Music]
We're on the same wavelength.
[Music]
I can't live without music, so whenever I go into a room, I put music on.
I come from a generation when there were the Beatles and there was classical music and
I went to a Jay-Z concert recently, so I'm sort of moving with the times.
I have kids who are twenty one and twenty four so through them, I keep up with the times
a bit, but I find classical music to be mood-inducing.
Composers have a different influence on me.
So if I'm about to go deliver a speech and it's in a passionate tone then I might listen
to one of the great symphonies of Beethoven and if it a rather gentle one, I might listen
to the sixth symphony.
So it's rather interesting and yet if I'm relaxing, I might listen to a Bach cello suite
or a Mozart piano concerto.
Interestingly, I've started to read music just in the last couple of years and to try
to play the piano.
Which I'm finding quite challenging.
The other thing that I find I really need is language.
I like language in all its forms.
When I went to Britain, I didn't speak English and yet 10 years later, I was president of
the debating society at Oxford and you learn a lot in those years, but part of the explanation
is that I have a real love for language and for words and that translates itself into
poetry, which I love in many different languages.
I love it in English, of course, but also in French and Italian and Hebrew.
It means a lot to me and perhaps because of my early schooling in this religious school
of Saint John the Baptist where they taught you poetry by wrote.
I have very rentetitve memory.
There are certain books that have marked me even decades later and I wonder how many of
this current generation have read Hundred Years of Solitude, y'know, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, a very much smaller book, The Bridge of San Luis Ray by Thornton Wilder.
And these are books that greatly marked me.
Sometimes I go back to leaf through them.
It's quite interesting that there's a Dickens revival now because it's the 200th anniversary
of his birth.
Dickens is—it turns out—was not only very excellent at novels, but an important social
reformer.
I was in a communist country and I was amazed to see a picture of Dickens alongside Marx,
Lenin and Stalin.
All framed together.
Sport.
Can't live without Sport.
I play tennis.
I jog.
That's a very necessary part of my existence and then travel I do too much of.
But I do enjoy going to new places.
And so I suppose if you looked at how much time my outside interests might take up and
I decided to do only that, I wouldn't have enough done for them.
I'm Ronald Cohen and you're watching Epiphany.