After dad died I put on a CD that has always reminded me of him. Fittingly it was a requiem mass, by Tomas Luis de Victoria, performed by the Gabrielli Consort. I remember him buying it purely on the strength of a review in the Independent. He put it on and we sat side by side on the sofa looking out into the garden as this extraordinary music began.

The Victoria requiem is the single most profound, most beautiful piece of music I have ever heard. But what I love most of all about it is it's humanity. There are no instruments just the incredible polyphonic harmonies of the male voices of the choir. Although the subject of the piece is death and mourning and it speaks to those subjects so strongly, to me it's context has always been a celebration of humanity and of life: the humanity of the person who wrote it; that of the singers who perform it. Listening to it I'll take all the horror in the world, the atrocities, the cruelty, the barabarism that man is capable of and I'll lay the Victoria requiem against them and say but look at this. And I'll win. And I'll take the most glorious sights of nature; a sunrise over the Pacific, Moraine Lake, Mount Fuji and I'll lay the Victoria requiem against them and say look at this act of human creation. And I'll win. And I think the reason that I think this way is because of my dad: he may not have thought the same things but he planted the seeds in my mind.

When we were there, sitting on the sofa, listening to the Victoria requiem for the first time I turned to look at him as the utterly sublime Kyrie came to it's reverberating ending. We both had tears streaming down our cheeks from the sheer beauty of the music. That's what I learned from dad - that the beauty of the human spirit can move you to tears. I used to tease him that his voice would start to crack or tears would start to roll when he was recouting a brilliant try by Jeremy Guscott, or Nelson Mandela walking to freedom or how much money was raised by Comic Relief. But I admired it really and from him I learned how right it was to celebrate the best of humanity. I never knew what to call this feeling until I heard Billy Bragg sing about a "socialism of the heart". Now, whenever I hear that I think of my dad and I know what he means.