Diary – 1 August 2009

As the President of the Associates of Rada and an ex-Rada student, I was asked to make a speech about my days at the academy for the third-year students and some of my friends.Speech-giving is tough, speech-writing even tougher and I envy Mr Obama and his silky way with words. Does he write them himself, I wonder, or does he have a team of experts crafting his elegant soliloquies? Certainly his recent speech in Kenya was masterful and he verbalised what many people thought for years and dared not speak for fear of offending the Gods of Political Correctness: namely, that Africa is to blame for its recent troubles.

My Rada speech was only a teensy bit politically incorrect but nevertheless it seemed to go down quite well. I was struck by the enormous difference in the way the students looked between today and the 1950s. They were all much older than our group.