Today’s citizens of Norwich have celebrated their city by taking their heritage and converting it into active use.

To spend time in this thriving, pluralistic, proud, vital place, that lives simultaneously in its many-layered past and its present – is a tonic experience, its values at the core of our identity, it seems to me: vigorously productive, sceptical of external authority, assertive of its achievements, democratic in its structures, rooted in its origins, its eye on the ball of the immediate future, but its heavenly vision one of the freedom of the greater citizenship.

I was moved; I still am.