There were 30 of them, young political activists from more than a dozen countries. Like a teacher on September 1st, I knew none of them, but recognised the potentially awkward, the hesitant and the bored. Then there was this petite Nordic with the big glasses - Anna Lindh, writes Tony Kinsella
That was over 20 years ago. Our paths were to intertwine over the years. She had a soft spot for Irish irreverence. When she described George Bush as the Lone Ranger, I would have asked if that made Colin Powell a reluctant Tonto. Anna would have enjoyed that.
She was deeply rooted not just in her native Sweden, but in the struggle of the Swedish labour movement for justice and equality. She recognised that she was both the heir to, and the product of, a mighty tradition - without ever being a prisoner to it.
Her opportunities all flowed from the struggles and sacrifices of those who had gone before her. She was quick to seize them, but never took them for granted.
Twenty years ago she was already convinced that managing our environment, in the broadest sense, was the combat of our age. She saw it as the direct successor to the earlier socialist struggles for universal suffrage, education, health care and housing. If we, as a species were to survive and prosper, then we as a species would have to manage ourselves, our resources, and our world.
She argued passionately that the primary management tool was our democratic institutions. We had a duty to pick up the torch, to defend what had been won, and extend it to the whole human race. No Blair-like embarrassment about where we had come from for Anna. Comrade was a natural, inclusive, term of respect in her vocabulary.
She wanted to change the world, to place people before profit, to make institutions work for people. She was a revolutionary, and persuasion was her weapon. Anna's arguments were every bit as compelling as they could be charming.
She had once defended Sweden's armed neutrality, and like me had once opposed EC membership. We came to realise that the route to a better world passed through a stronger Europe. Our New Europe, warts and all, was the best hope for democracy, the rule of law, and human progress in a chaotic world.
We met in Stockholm not long after the murder of Olof Palme. I asked if security had been tightened around Swedish politicians. Her body marginally stiffened in that way she had of signalling something important. She replied with steely passion that no, security had not been, and should not be, tightened. Swedish comrades had struggled and sacrificed to build a more open, more egalitarian, society. To erect barriers between the people and their representatives would be to surrender part of that political progress.
She was, of course, completely correct. In a Stockholm department store, she paid the ultimate price for that correctness.
The years passed, the glasses got smaller, the hair a little less blond. She and her husband, Bo Holmberg, had two sons, Filip and David.
She was a brilliant, respected, nay even loved, foreign minister - as the distinctly non-routine tributes from around the world testify.
I always thought Anna epitomised the future - what should be the norm but remains all too often impossible. A successful politician - widely tipped as a future prime minister for her beloved Sweden - and a warm, fun-loving, serious, dedicated woman, wife and mother.
The world is a better place because Anna Lindh walked and worked and laughed and loved amongst us. It is a poorer place without her. Progress towards the ideals she so strongly advocated would be the best tribute to her. She would have asked for nothing more. She deserves nothing less.
Tony Kinsella, a Dubliner, lives and works as a writer in the south of France. In the 1980s, he was a trainer at the European Youth Centre in Strasbourg. In 1982, he was Dick Spring's national director of elections