Yes, last week I passed the 76 mark – someone even thought I was born in 76!  So well done Me, for keeping myself alive and relatively well preserved since conception on or about Valentine’s Day 1940: a pure Golden Dragon, born and conceived in the same year.

And what prompts this splurge of self-glorification?  A quote on Faecbook, no less, from the man who was UK Prime Minister for the first few years of my life:

‘When you’re twenty you care what people think about you.  When you’re forty you stop caring what they think about you.  And when you’re sixty you realise nobody was thinking about you in the first place.’ Winston Churchill.

So let me reassure you, and me, that over 200 facebook friends, 190 of whom I have never met, thought about me on my birthday.  Thank you.  And to the remaining 1,750 friends, I thought about you, although I’ve never met you either.  Thought collectively, that is, not individually.

So, let us now get on with the business of life today, remembering and celebrating Judas Maccabaeus recapturing Jerusalem, the Mayflower Compact signed by Pilgrims, Napoleon Bonaparte’s promotion to General, China banning the opium trade, and Thomas Edison announcing his new invention – the phonograph.