Very sad news that Vaclav Havel has died.

I spent a bit of time this afternoon watching some old films from 1989 on You Tube. It is amazing how it now all seems so long ago and a different world, which I suppose it was.

We owe him, and his fellow leaders in what we had used to call Eastern Europe, a huge debt of gratitude not just for what happened then but also in the way they managed to navigate those first few months and years of freedom.

Maybe not everything happened perfectly or without problems, but in avoiding bloodshed and a return to communism, the debt that we, and particularly the citizens of those contries, owe to people such as Vaclav Havel is vast.