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1950 – what a year! Winston Churchill was back in Downing Street. The supermarket trolley made its first appearance in England at a store owned by a certain J. Sainsbury of Croydon. And two babies were born exactly four weeks apart – myself on 14 January, and Kath on 11 February.

Nothing much else happened for the rest of the decade – except for Elvis inventing rock ‘n’ roll, two Cambridge undergraduates inventing competitive tiddlywinks. When they weren’t playing tiddlywinks, two others found time to discover DNA. Alex Isigonis designed the Mini, England’s first motorway – the mighty Preston Bypass – was opened, ITV was launched, Cliff sang Living Doll, and two young men from Liverpool formed a skiffle band called The Quarrymen. Fortunately, The Sixties were just around the corner when we would be able to make our first faltering steps towards inventing the modern world.

So, The Swinging Sixties. Skirts got shorter and hair got longer – too short for some, too long for others. The first Moon landing. Mass university education. As some here will testify, the recently-built universities also served as marriage bureaux. For the benefit of our younger viewers, that’s what dating sites used to be called. Package holidays. Instead of boarding coaches to take us to Scarborough or Skegness, we started to board planes that took us to exotic places like Benidorm and Majorca. And if we were nervous about flying – it might be our first time, after all – we could calm our nerves by lighting one of the cigarettes that we’d seen advertised on television.

England won the World Cup – the men’s World Cup, though no-one at the time thought to specify the gender. Sheffield Wednesday nearly won the FA Cup, but threw away a two-goal lead to lose 3-2 to Everton. The Summer of Love. BBC2. And those two young men from Liverpool – remember them? – they became the global phenomenon The Beatles.

The Seventies. Like the Titanic, they started well, but ended in catastrophe. A small music festival was held near Glastonbury. Rod Stewart sang Maggie May. Bruce Forsyth invited us to play The Generation Game. Eric Morecombe assured Mr. Preview – Andre Previn – that he was playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order. And those graduates from the 1960s discovered Delia Smith and the dinner party. This typically consisted of four to eight people, half of them teachers. The starter might be prawn cocktail served in a wine glass, followed by Beef Bourguignon, perhaps using wine that the hosts had brought back from their camping holiday in France, and the dessert was often Black Forest Gateau.

And then the catastrophe. On 04 May 1979 Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister.

But then came The Eighties and The New World Order – or children, as they are sometimes called. First Kate in February 1981, Matthew a month later, Harry in 1984. Alex waited until 1993 to be born. Other notable figures. Kieth Floyd – the original and best who showed us that there’s more to fish than an unidentified frying object wrapped in newspaper – yes, the Daily Mail had its uses in those days. Cliff – this time aided and abetted by The Young Ones – sang Living Doll again. Floella – now Baroness Floella – Benjamin welcomed us to Playschool. I can’t think of anything else ... oh, ah – Vienna: perhaps the best song never to reach number one. And what kept it off the number one slot? Shut uppa your face by Joe Dolce, a one-hit wonder who truly deserved never to have another

The Nineties. My first mobile phone, a Nokia 3410 – and here it is (hold it up). You could make calls with it, you could receive calls with it, you could send and receive texts. What more could you want? Well, we were soon to find out.

The Noughties. A mere four years into the new century – the new millennium – a certain Mark Zuckerberg devised a way in which his Harvard chums could communicate with one another via the recently invented internet. He called it Facebook. The verb “to google” first appeared in The Oxford English Dictionary. To give it its full conjugation: I google, thou googlest, he, she, it, googleth – not to be confused with Google Earth, which is what our plane is now called. This was when the modern world really got going.

The Teens. Yes, we were teenagers again – only this time no-one could tell us that our skirts were too short or that our hair – what was left of it – was too long. We were free to grow old disgracefully, and that’s what we did. Like Dylan Thomas we didn’t go gently into that goodnight. Rather, like Jenny Joseph in her poem Warning, we decided to spend our pensions on brandy and summer gloves and satin sandals, and if we felt like it we ate three pounds of sausages at a go or only bread and pickle for a week.

But then came the twenties and the C word – Covid. Three years ago this gathering wouldn’t have been possible – unless we called it “work” and were chums of Boris Johnson. When Talleyrand was asked what he did in the French Revolution, he said, “I survived.” Well, we survived – as did Rod Stewart. Yes – now knighted – he’s back and he’ll be performing on the Legends Stage at Glasto (as it’s now called) in a few weeks from now. The more things change ...

Now I’ve reached the age when, if the name of a celebrity gets a mention on the wireless, either I’ve never heard of them or if I have, they’ve just died. Or I find myself thinking, “Why would parents call a girlchild Taylor or a child of either gender – sorry, any gender – why would they call her Chapel? She’s a child, not a place of worship.”

So, what have I learned over the last seventy-five years? When the Duke of Wellington was asked a similar question, he replied, “Whenever you get the opportunity, make water.” As someone who has experienced an enlarged prostate which prevented me from making water and which would have killed me were it not for our wonderful though under-funded and too often disparaged NHS, I can relate to what the Iron Duke said, and I follow his advice whenever and wherever possible. Something else I’ve learned: football is a game of two halves, then you lose in the playoffs.

As to the future, like Yossarian in Catch-22, I’m determined to live for ever or die in the attempt. I’ve got good role models, after all – Rod Stewart I’ve already mentioned, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and – dare I say it? – Donald Trump.

And now, like Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say on the subject. I bid you so- long, and thanks for all the fish.

SeaBee