Low life | 9 July 2011

I listened to actor, presenter, and ‘activist’ Tony Robinson choose his Desert Island Discs on Sunday. He’s a doctrinaire leftist, and all my prejudices are on the opposite side, so I didn’t expect I would be cheering the man on. Nor did I. I’m an ardent listener to Desert Island Discs and I don’t think I have ever heard such flagrant moral vanity in a castaway.

However, he said two things that I agreed with profoundly. One was that we owe a debt of gratitude to the generation who fought the war and that we ought to treat them better in their old age. The other was how thrilling it is to take your grandchild to the zoo, as he had recently done.

Of course, the first goes without saying — though I was surprised to hear this vast repository of conservatism applauded. The second I would have dismissed as sentimental twaddle up to about 19 months ago, when my first grandchild, Oscar, was born.