My 2019: mice, Marrakesh and a fond farewell to my dear friend Christopher Booker

Another year over and it wasn’t all bad, you know. Here are some of my personal highlights.

Best birthday parties: my dear old friend Liz Hogg’s 90th and my dear older friend’s Jim Lovelock’s 100th. The latter, in the Orangerie at Blenheim Palace, was possibly the most unboring semi-formal social occasion I’ve ever attended. My table included the philosopher John Gray, a dapper Japanese gentleman who had been blown out of his bed by the Hiroshima bomb, and an economist from northern Uganda who’d narrowly escaped the Lord’s Resistance Army massacres. For her PhD, she had delighted in triggering her thesis supervisors by arguing that western aid programmes don’t work. Jim Lovelock is one of the most extra-ordinary people I have ever met: a free spirit, always eager for new ideas, beholden to nobody, loving life. I’m sure that’s one of the three reasons why he has thrived to such a ripe old age — the others being his amazing wife Sandy and his unlikely Inuit genetic stock.