I received my Christmas present earlier than usual. It was a message sent via The Spectator from a gentleman who had been a reader since — hold on to your hats — 1947, when he was 18 years of age. He is now 90 and believed me to be 88. I thanked him and said that I was only 83. The message included some advice: to keep going, and that I still sounded young, and that was it. The best present by far.
Just think of it. What the world was like when the nice Bernard Cowley began reading The Spectator in 1947. The French were top bananas in French Indochina, as Vietnam was then called. There was French Morocco, and Algeria was considered part of mainland France. India was about to be partitioned, with catastrophic consequences, and the first postwar Olympics were to take place the next year in London.
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