Not marking a death but celebrating a life

Getting to know my father, in the mid-1950s

It’s a strange sensation to wake up and discover it’s the 24^th of May, as happened to me this morning. Or at least, it has been a little odd for 37 years now (and it amazes me to realise it has been that long). 

It was on that day in 1983 that my father died.

For 35 years, it was particularly difficult because my mother always took it badly. She had the terrible misfortune of being a widow longer than she was married: she survived my father for 35 years, having been married for 32.

Each year, I would ring her and wonder how to broach the subject. Should I bring it up? Should I let her raise it? If I spoke first might I upset her by reminding her, or if I waited to let her mention it, might I upset her by seeming to have forgotten?

Yes. She wasn’t easy, my mother. Many fine and attractive qualities but being simple to know and get along with wasn’t one of them.

I would always suggest to her that we shouldn’t fixate on the 24^th of May, but rather concentrate on the 15^th of September, his birthday, which was always a good day in the family. A day to celebrate rather than a day to mourn. But poor woman, she grieved all the same.

Well, she died nearly two years ago. So this year, I am going to mark the death of my father not with a lament, but with a celebration. A brief overview of his life in photos.

Here he is in his first year. This would have been late 1921 or early 1922.

He was brought up in Brussels, and here he is at four walking up one of the main streets with his mother.

In 1936, he was 15 and in the boy scouts.

By the early 1940s, he was in uniform again, but for war service in the Royal Air Force.

In 1951, he married my mother in Genoa. And why not Genoa? The obvious place to get married, for an Englishman raised in Belgium and who met his wife-to-be in Paris.

They stopped in Nervi, near Genoa, before honeymooning near Naples. He then took up a position he held for sixteen years, at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, in Rome (which is where both my brother and I were born).

In 1960, he posed rather well, I think, by the River Congo, while serving with the UN Emergency mission. He returned to that country with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1967, after his stint in Rome.

In 1964, we had a rather good holiday in what was then Yugoslavia, and stopped at various places on the way back to Rome, including Venice where you can see him feeding the pigeons in St Mark’s Square with my brother.

In 1977, he was approaching retirement, still with the UNDP but at its headquarters in New York.

He retired to France, to Michauroi, a hamlet lost in the countryside of the Charente Department. He loved being there, though he and my mother would also travel to England regularly, staying in a flat they rented in Bromley. Here he is (at right) with my mother (at the back near the centre) and some friends. At that time, he only had two years ahead of him.

He had a rich and varied life and did a lot of things that mattered to him – his war service, his work for the UN in the Congo Emergency, his work on projects for the UNDP. He died far too young, at 61. His style of life had done nothing for his health, however satisfying it was in other ways.

Even if he hadn’t died then, I don’t suppose he would have made it till today. He’d have been rising 99 now. But I still miss him. He was an excellent father and a lot of fun.

Which is what I prefer to mark on the 24^th of May.

African funeral or how to bear our troubles more lightly

Introducing his song The Pause of Mr Claus (you don’t know it? Listen to it, and its tribute to the FBI, on YouTube), Arlo Guthrie shares an insight with us:

During these hard days and hard weeks, everybody always has it bad once in a while. You know, you have a bad time of it, and you always have a friend who says "Hey man, you ain't got it that bad. Look at that guy." And you look at that guy, and he's got it worse than you. And it makes you feel better that there's somebody that's got it worse than you.

There’s a lot of truth in that. At least in the sense that it does you good to remember that there are people out there who are having a worse time than you are. That isn’t because you’re pleased by their suffering, but because it relativises your own.

Pierre with my father (sitting), and a friend
when they first met, during the UN mission
for the Congo emergency in 1960

This was brought home to me some decades ago by a family friend we spent a Christmas with, when my father was posted by the United Nations to what was then called Zaïre and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in equatorial Africa. His name was Pierre and he was from Belgium, the former colonial power out there – and if you want an example of people suffering a lot more than you’re likely to, just take a look at the Congo under Belgian rule. It was barbaric, with casual murders of the local population, or limbs cut off on a whim of a colonial overlord. Belgium must be a serious contender for the title of worst European colonial power, and the competition’s pretty hot for that coveted award.

At the time of that Christmas visit, Pierre was managing a small rubber plantation way out in the sticks, some 500 km east of the capital, Kinshasa. 

He told us this story.

Years before he’d been at school with a boy, Charles, a couple of years younger than him. Charles was slight, weak and not in particularly good health. Pierre remembered him as the kind of child who has trouble making friends, is often bullied and leaves little trace in the memory of the people around him.

After they left school, there had been the war and Nazi occupation, and after that Pierre had gone out to the Congo to build a career. He’d been through the horrors of the independence struggle followed by civil war. It had taken firmness of purpose and not a little strength, both physical and emotional, to stick it out.

Two or three years before he told us this story, soon after he’d been appointed to his plantation manager post, he’d been visited by a fellow Belgian from a neighbouring plantation. ‘Neighbouring’ in that context meant an hour or two’s drive away, given the dirt roads of the region, bad at the best of times, and almost impassable in wet weather. To Pierre’s surprise, his visitor was Charles who’d brought his new wife to meet Pierre.

“I’d pretty well forgotten him,” Pierre told us, “but he remembered me and soon enough my memories came back too.”

They traded reminiscences for a while, Pierre making sure he embellished his a little, so as not to offend Charles. Then they parted company, meeting only infrequently after that – communications were far too poor for regular visiting.

Then, a few weeks before our arrival, Pierre heard that Charles had been taken ill.

“Hardly surprising. When he came to see me, it was obvious his health was as delicate as ever, and this isn’t an easy place to live.”

Pierre visited him once in hospital and found him wasted and worsening.

“To me it didn’t look like he was going to last much longer. I decided I’d better go and see him again soon or I’d be too late.”

But other things intervened and he had to keep putting off his visit until, at midnight one evening, there was a knocking at his front door. His visitors were two nuns from the hospital, and he invited them in. After tea and some small talk, he felt it was time to turn to the business of so late a call.

“What can I do for you, sisters?” he asked.

It turned out it was about Charles. He’d taken a terrible turn for the worse that morning and, that evening, had died.

“Oh,” said Pierre, kicking himself for not having been to see him. “And, I suppose, you want me to break the news to his widow?”

“Oh, no,” said one of the nuns, “we can do that. We wanted to know what you thought we should do with the body.”

“The body?” he said. “Why, leave it in the mortuary.”

“That’s just it,” said the nun, “we’ve got it in the back of the jeep.”

It turned out that Charles had died while the nurse who was supposed to be supervising him had been away from the bedside. He, the nurse, had dumped the body into the back of a jeep and then bullied the two nuns to take it round to the new widow. I can’t picture to myself the scene, had she been presented with the body of her husband in the small hours of the morning.

With this auspicious start, Pierre found himself made responsible for the funeral arrangements. Bodies need to be buried fast in the tropics, and Pierre organised everything for three days later. 

Unfortunately, this was the time of year when the dry season was poised to give way to the wet. In the event, the weather broke on the day of the funeral itself.

The European men in the region tended to have just one suit each. They were making their way to church for the service when the torrential rain, as it falls in Africa, began to beat down on them, leaving them struggling through a morass of mud and even having to clear fallen trees from the road ahead of them. They turned up at the church with their best clothes mud-spattered and soaked.

A funeral service is never cheerful, but the atmosphere of wet clothing, bad tempers and mud made this one particularly painful. Things became worse still when the lightning started up and knocked out the electrical power. It then added a crowning touch, by sending balls of blue flame up and down the inside of the darkened church. So the service ended by the garish light of ball lightning, providing an entirely fitting background to the sobs of the grieving widow.

That was when the gravediggers announced that they could no longer find the grave.

The mourners stepped outside into the downpour. The whole of the bottom of the graveyard, where the new grave had been dug, was now flooded. In the new temporary lake, there was no way to identify where Charles’s final resting place had been prepared for him.

I don’t think of Pierre’s story often enough. I should. It would help me realise that there are people out there having a worse time than I am. In turn, that might teach me to take my own troubles less seriously.

Kataryna and the sad tale of lost English opportunity

Kataryna left her home in central Poland to establish herself in Brussels because, she told us, she was “in love.”

The object of this love was a fellow Pole, and they married in Belgium. But it didn’t really take. Two or three years later she decided that it was time to call it a day: they had no kids, nothing that really tied them to each other, and there was no point in struggling on with a marriage that wasn’t going anywhere.

It was a hard decision for her to take. “I’d said for the rest of my life, and I meant for the rest of my life. It was difficult to change that.”

Her Catholic Polish upbringing was against it, but she went through with the divorce.

Her family clamoured for her to come back home. But she resisted.

“I had a life here. And I felt something was waiting to happen for me in Belgium, which wouldn’t back in Poland.”

Kataryna in her Polish bakery and café

So she stayed on. She works in a Polish bakery and café in the mornings – that’s where we met her – but, in term time, she teaches Polish to children in several schools in the Etterbeek district with its large population of Poles.

“And there really was something waiting to happen for me. I fell in love again, with a Belgian, and we’ve been married ten years. He’s 50, thirteen years older than me, and my friends all warned me that he would betray me and leave me. But he hasn’t, not yet. At least, I always feel he’s there behind me, supporting me, and I don’t feel he’s ever been unfaithful. Maybe I’m a fool, but that’s what I feel.”

It seems that she gets physically ill when he’s away, and then miraculously recovers when he returns. Apparently he also feels lonely and incomplete when he’s separated from Kataryna.

Her husband brought her a ready-made family of three. His first wife left him with all three soon after the birth of the last. Kataryna finds the youngest easy, since he has only known her. The other two were more problematic, especially the middle child, a girl now entering teenage.

“It isn’t simple,” she says.

We wished her well. I hope the marriage is as good, as solid as she believes it is. I hope life continues to treat her as well in Belgium as she feels it has so far.

Her café drew us to it on both days we were in the area. Our breakfast was all the more pleasant for listening to her story, although it was surprising that she should speak so openly to strangers. Surprising but also cordial and friendly.

Many more Poles will be able to follow in Kataryna’s footsteps if they wish. And Belgians will be able to go back in the other direction: as my wife and I know from several trips to Kraków, the flows are beginning to reverse, with other EU citizens seeking careers in Poland.

Sadly, in the future, neither Belgians nor Poles will find it as easy to choose to settle in England. Brexit will see to that. Equally, English people who might want to pursue a dream, or love, or just simply a job opportunity, elsewhere in Europe, will no longer find that an easy option.

In England, sadly, we’ve chosen to give up the right to free movement. A freedom, not an obligation. We gave it up so that we wouldn’t have to grant it to our neighbours. We have restricted ourselves in order not to be generous to others.

With her ready smile and open spirit, Kataryna was a living symbol of how valuable a liberty England has decided to abandon.

Curious bicentenary

Two hundred years ago on Monday of this week, 15 June 1815, which back then happened to be a Thursday, the Duchess of Richmond held a ball in Brussels.

As well as guests of other nationalities, many elegant British visitors to that city attended. They had come to the Low Countries in the wake of the Duke of Wellington’s army, or they had fled there from Paris, where they had been celebrating the fall of his nemesis, Napoleon, the previous year – right up to the time that the Emperor had reappeared in France and effortlessly eased his way back into power, less than three months earlier.

The ball was a glittering affair, but with a painful ending. When disturbing news reached Wellington, he asked the Duke of Richmond whether he had a map. Soon after, Wellington, staring at the map, exclaimed “Napoleon has humbugged me, by God; he has gained twenty-four hours' march on me.”

One of the guests at the ball, Katherine Arden, wrote that “on our arrival at the ball we were told that the troops had orders to march at three in the morning, and that every officer must join his regiment by that time, as the French were advancing… Those who had brothers and sons to be engaged openly gave way to their grief, as the last parting of many took place at this most terrible ball.”

Napoleon had sent forces to a crossroads, appropriately named Quatre Bras (four arms). Control of the crossroads meant he could move either east towards the Prussian forces under Marshall Blücher, or towards the Anglo-Allied forces under Wellington. The latter, still trying to protect his right wing, had made no move to defend the crossroads, but fortunately some of his Dutch troops had taken it on themselves to take up positions there.

As a result, when Napoleon’s Marshall Ney reached the crossroads he found them held, however lightly, and decided to postpone an attack until the morning. But the allied side reinforced their position overnight.

As a result, when day broke on the Friday, two hundred years ago from Tuesday 16 June of this year, the first fighting was more nearly balanced than might have been expected. Technically, the day was a victory for the allies, since the French left the field. However, Wellington realised that the position was untenable and pulled back to positions he’d scouted previously, along the ridge of Mont St Jean, not far from the town of Waterloo.

British infantry at Quatre Bras
in the “square” defensive formation against cavalry

In the meantime, Napoleon had engaged Blücher and his Prussians at Ligny. This time the victory was technically French, since the Prussians withdrew from the field, one of the reasons Wellington felt obliged to retreat from Quatre Bras. But the Prussians retreated in good order, more than ready to fight again. One of the strengths of the Prussians was the training of their staff officers. It made the Prussian Army devastatingly efficient, the main reason why, despite its defeat, it could reorganise and move towards Waterloo within 48 hours.

By contrast, poor French staff work sent Napoleon’s marshall Grouchy, to “follow” the Prussians, whatever “following” meant.

Two hundred years ago from our Wednesday 17 June, the Saturday of that week, Wellington prepared his positions at Waterloo. He complained that he had “an infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced Staff.” But, in the small hours of the next day – he was up at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. – he sent a crucial letter to Blücher, assuring him that if he could send one army corps in support, he, Wellington, would stand and fight at Waterloo.

Blücher’s number 2, Gneisenau, was far from convinced that they should trust Wellington. But Blücher insisted they send three corps.

Two hundred years ago from Thursday 18 June, the Sunday of that week – there was no respect for the Sabbath – Wellington commanded 68,000 men, only 25,000 of them British (many of them actually Irish), 20,000 from the King’s possessions in Germany (the British King was also Elector of Hannover), a further 6000 Germans in the King’s German Legion (exiles fighting in the British Army) and 17,000 Dutch-Belgians.

Facing them were 73,000 French commanded by Napoleon himself. He took a leisurely approach to the day, breakfasting well, assuring his officers that the Prussians would need at least two days to reorganise, and once more ordering Grouchy to keep pressing them from the rear.

The ground at Waterloo was sodden, and Napoleon waited some hours for it to dry under the sun. Oddly, no one seems to know exactly when the battle began. The first shots were probably fired at the end of the morning or soon after noon. But the battle made up in ferocity for the delay in its start, and within a few hours Wellington was under acute pressure: at about 4:30, a farm at the centre of his line, la Haye Sainte, fell to the French and his position was fatally weakened.

He desperately needed the Prussians to arrive, but as he told the story, “the time they occupied in approaching seemed interminable. Both they and my watch seemed to have stuck fast.”

However, at much the same time as la Haye Sainte fell, the Prussians were already joining the action. The small numerical advantage of the French was wiped out by the arrival of these 50,000 fresh men. And Grouchy, trying to follow his orders, never showed up with his 33,000.

Prussian troops investing the village of Plancenoit
Just in time, from Wellington's point of view

Less than a week later, Napoleon abdicated for the second and final time. Reactionary regimes were established in France, Prussia, Russia and Austria. The fall of Napoleon is strangely ambivalent: he was a military dictator who had undone whatever gains the French revolution had made, and even went so far as to try to reintroduce slavery; on the other hand, with him out of the way, the cause of social progress in Europe was set back for decades, including in Britain. 

Militarily, Britain pulled off a brilliant piece of spin, painting Waterloo as a national victory, although only just over one in five soldiers on the allied side was British and the majority were German.

Britain became the pre-eminent world power for the best part of a century, but that disguised a much more dangerous truth shown by Waterloo: the rise of Germany, under Prussian leadership, as far and away the most effective military force in Europe.

Waterloo. Quite a day. With strange and complex results.

Enjoy the bicentenary!

Countdown to War, Day 35. 1 August: Russian and Germany at war. Any hope still for British neutrality?

One hundred years ago today, on Saturday 1 August 1914, Martin and his tracklayer friends would have been hard put to it to find much good news in the Manchester Guardian.

“THE CATASTROPHE APPROACHES”.

At least that was a headline that didn’t mince its words.

Europe is very near war. Last night even the firmest friends of peace were almost without hope.

Little doubt remains that all Russia’s forces are being mobilised. In the House of Commons yesterday Mr. Asquith, on the authority of Berlin, announced the extension of the partial Russian mobilisation reported several days ago. He understood that Germany would issue like orders...

A most serious message came yesterday from the meeting-place of the German, Russian, and Austrian frontiers. It reported on what is described as official authority the destruction by the Russians of the neighbouring bridge over the Austro-Russian frontier, between Granitza in Russia and Szczakowa in Austria...

German news is equally grave. Official announcement is made of the suspension of the international train services into the Empire; telephone communication with Denmark and Belgium has been stopped...

Our Paris correspondent, in a late message, says at a Council of Ministers yesterday orders were given for six army corps on the German frontier to mobilise...

Italy is said to have decided to remain neutral...

German troops heading to attack the Russians

“It’s all falling apart,” said Martin.

“Oh, don’t be so gloomy,” exclaimed one of his friends, “It’s time to get stuck in. We’re going to show them who’s boss and we’ll have some fun. It’ll be over by Christmas.”

“Get stuck in?” asked another, “which side would you like us to join?”

“Why – the Germans of course. They’ve got proper soldiers.”

“You haven’t been listening, have you? Ours is the other side. With the Frogs.”

Martin intervened. “Neither side’s our side. The whole thing’s nothing to do with us. We need to stay neutral just like Italy.”

“We’re nothing like Italy,” said the Cynic, “you watch. We’ll go in. It won’t be over by Christmas. And it won’t be fun.”

The Guardian wasn’t yet prepared to give up on British neutrality.

Evidence grows that public opinion is becoming shocked and alarmed at the thought that this country could be dragged into the horrors of a general European war, although she has no direct interest in it and is admittedly bound by no treaty obligations to take part in it.

Martin found it hard to take much encouragement from these words. He was beginning to suspect that the Cynic might be right: the government wanted to go in, and no amount of opposition was going to stop it. Indeed, elsewhere in the Guardian journalists seemed close to that position themselves. The leader writer, in particular, argued that:

... there is in our midst an organised conspiracy to drag us into the war should the attempts of the peace-makers fail. “Conspiracy” we say because it is disloyal to Parliament, which is the constitutional guardian of the national interests in times of crisis. The conspirators prefer the confidence of selected newspaper editors to that of the representatives of the people. The objects of the conspirators are now openly avowed. We are to join in, not under certain conditions or in defence of this or that British interest which may happen to be threatened, but in any case.

Against the conspirators, the Socialist movement on which Martin had counted had taken a serious blow. The Frenchman Jean Jaurès had been one of its most prominent leaders internationally, and a major opponent of war, like Ramsay MacDonald in the British Labour Party. But fate had been less kind to him. There was a report from Paris:

The Government has decided to placard the following proclamation on the walls of Paris:

“Citizens, – An abominable attack has just been made on M. Jaurès. The great orator, who was such an ornament of the French public platform, has been basely assassinated. Personally, and in the name of my colleagues, I bow before the fall, so premature, of the Socialist Republican who fought for such a noble cause, and who in these troublous days has, by his authority, supported the action of the Government in the interests of peace.”

Jean Jaurès at his best

Jaurès had been a leading contender for socialist collaboration between the peoples of France and Germany to prevent the war.

“Just when we needed him most, he’s been bumped off,” said Martin.

“Because you thought he was getting somewhere? The people rising? Stopping the war?” asked the Cynic.

In any case, however clear the question of which side Britain was on might be to some people, it really wasn’t that obvious. The leader writer quoted with approval the nineteenth-century politician John Bright, who referred to the long-term objective of British foreign policy, the “balance of power”, as a “will o’ the wisp”. However inappropriate that balance was as a goal, a supposed ally of Britain’s might well overthrow it in the coming war, while the likely enemy might reinforce it.

If Russia wins there will be the greatest disturbance of the balance of power that the world has ever seen. The whole conditions of our continued existence as an Asiatic Power will have be revised, and all over the world, wherever we come into contact with Russia, we shall have a repetition of the self-effacement which we have witnessed in Persia. The victory of Germany, on the other hand, would in effect be a victory for the principle of the balance of power. If we believed in this principle – which we do not, – then we might be for intervention on the side of Germany.

Those urging war seemed particularly concerned with the notion of the “neutrality of Belgium”, now “it is assumed, ... in danger from Germany, and from her alone.”

“I don’t give a damn about the neutrality of Belgium,” declared an older tracklayer in the crew, “just the neutrality of Britain.”

Martin agreed. And it felt to him as though that neutrality wouldn’t be guaranteed for long.

And on top of all that? Another headline proclaimed “Lancashire outplayed by Warwickshire.” The match ended as a draw but only because time ran out. Lancashire had been heading for disaster otherwise.

What a year.

Bus travel broadens the mind

Misquotations are by definition incorrect, but they’re not always wrong.

A wonderful example is the severe statement attributed to Maggie Thatcher, ‘a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure.’ Though it now looks as though she never spoke those words, it perfectly sums up the arrogance she often showed, her tendency to mistake prejudice for judgement, and her conviction of the superiority of ‘her people’ – even though those people never accepted her as one of their own and they turned on her ruthlessly as soon as they decided that she no longer served their purposes.

It's a judgement that makes me a total failure, of course. To confess the full extent of my ignominy, not only do I frequently use buses, I actually like them.

In the first place, I’d always choose a bus if the alternative is London Underground, which as well as being overcrowded and short of seats, inevitably suffers from all the unpleasantness that goes with the word ‘underground’ itself.

Buses also have actual positive merits to recommend them. For instance, the number 10 which carries me so often between my railway station and my office has recently taken on surprising value as a symbol of international relations. It is operated by the RATP – the Paris transport network. That’s has significance I can only describe as millenarian – I can’t think of a similar French invasion of English daily life since William of Normandy landed at Hastings in 1066.


Ah, ça alors! Zese French, zey are debarking
chez nous again. And on my bus too

You can also meet interesting people on buses. I recently found myself sitting at the front of the upper deck of my number 10, across the aisle from a father travelling with his eight-year old daughter. They were talking what to my ear sounded like Dutch but not in any accent that I associate with Holland. Danielle tells me that Dutch is just ‘homity-homity-homity’ and they didn’t sound remotely like that. And I was impressed by the daughter who was reading adverts off other buses or roadside hoardings and translating them to her father. When I asked where they were from, they gave me what I suppose was the obvious answer: Belgium.


Extraordinary place, Belgium. They haven’t had a government for months, but I was there in March and everything’s running just fine: the trains, the restaurants, the shops. That reminded me of the previous occasion I’d had that kind of experience, in Italy, in 1979. When I arrived, the country had been without a government for four months; when I left, it had been without a government for six months. That didn’t prevent my enjoying some magical times in the glorious Alpine town of Aosta, where I spent many an evening listening to a Mexican friend describing in a Spanish I only half understood the mythical background of his country, while we sipped pink wine in the pink central square filled with the pink light of the setting sun.

You see? You can even get quite lyrical without a government. Perhaps, given where Italy is today in its Berlusconi-fied state, it’s positively easier without a government.

Curiously, Danielle and I had a not dissimilar experience in the last few days, in Madrid. Spain provides the ‘S’ of that dismal acronym PIIGS, the nations including Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Greece, whose financial difficulties are most threatening the financial stability of Europe. And in Spain the sun still shines, the olives are as succulent, the beer is as cold and the churros as delicious and calorific as ever. Which makes me think that the country hasn’t really lurched from doing fabulously well, generating over-optimistic exuberance among commentators, to doing catastrophically badly, inspiring their doom-laden horror – it has gone from doing well to doing less well.

The problem is the commentators. A small change is enough to plunge them from excessive hopes to unjustified gloom. The sad thing is that governments listen to the commentators, so some day if one of the credit agencies decides to downgrade Spain’s credit rating, there might be real problems. But will the rating reflect the financial difficulties, or will the rating cause them?

But back to Belgium. Another frequently repeated saying, again with a lot of truth in it, is that the King of the Belgians is actually the only Belgian. The others are all Flemish or Walloon, with a handful of Germans thrown in for good measure.

As the father on the bus explained to me, at school he found himself obliged to learn Flemish – Dutch without the homity-homity – French and German, to cover the official languages of the Belgian state (it’s not a nation).

‘But then,’ he told me, ‘I discovered that as an IT specialist, I wasn’t going to get anywhere without English, so I had to learn that too. And then I worked in South America, so I learned Spanish. And of course, I’ve also had to master computer languages.’

I wanted to ask him to say something in C++ or T-SQL, but I was nearly at my stop. So I wished them well and left, full of admiration at their linguistic abilities – particularly the daughter’s. I wonder how many of our eight-year olds would be able to translate advertising out of a foreign language?

The experience also confirmed my view that bus travel is a wonderful way to set in motion all sorts of interesting trains of thought . As I hope I’ve shown.

That makes it a pretty remarkable mode of transport, whatever Mrs T. might have said on the subject.

Or, alternatively, never said.