So there it is then.  Three score year and ten.  Done and dusted.   Except that nowadays thanks to modern medicine, and better diets, we can all expect to exceed the Biblical speed limit.

Seventy is the new black.

All sorts of people wanted to talk to me on the occasion of my Seventieth birthday, as if for all the world I was having a Parade down the Thames or launching a new Product.  Even the silly old Daily Mail wanted to interview me, as if they haven’t done enough damage to old friendships.  Thankfully John Cleese and I have taken a lot of care to repair the harm they did to our relationship and I don’t care to give them an excuse to revive a story they invented in the first place.  Python’s at War!    Really?   I’ll tell you what a war is sonny.   I was born during a war.  A motherfucker of a war.  By March 29^th 1943 Great Britain had struggled through three and a half long years of an impossible war against Hitler.  The nightly aerial bombardment of cities, the terrifying U boats sinking convoys of vital food,  the sense of isolation that we stood alone against a Continent entirely enclosed by Nazism.  We should never have survived, but thanks to the indomitable will of Winston Churchill we fought on alone, until eventually Hitler declared war on the US, a few days after Pearl Harbor.  Only then could we be reasonably hopeful of survival.   Still another two more years of terror and terrible bloodshed would pass before Hitler finally committed suicide in his Berlin Bunker.  Then the nightmare years of the Cold War, Stalinism throughout much of devastated Europe, the Iron Curtain, the Nuclear Nightmare of the arms race, and at home, rationing, shortages and devastated bomb sites everywhere.

And you think your world is bad!

Oh no, the internet is down…..

It’s as though I was born on a completely different planet.

• No food.   Spam for meat and food rationing until we were ten.
• No TV.    I didn’t even see it until the Queen’s coronation in 1952.
• No computers of course.  Not till 1990 did I get mine.
• No internet.
• No Cell phones.  Actually no phones at all.
• No videos or recording devices of any kind.
• No cars.   I didn’t own one until I was 24.
• No India.  Until 1947 partition.
• No Israel.  Until 1948.
• No passenger flights.  (See Luftwaffe)
• No Space flights.   (Except for incoming Rockets fired by Werner Von Braun.)
• No Satellites.
• No Black Holes.
• No immense Universe.  We are still scrambling to understand just how big the damn thing is.
• No Dark Matter.
• No sex.

Well a bit, obviously and not for me obviously because I was far too young, but there was quite a lot of sex during the war, or we wouldn’t be here.  Sexual liberation didn’t begin until the Sixties, which themselves didn’t begin until 1963.   They too were late.  And the Sixties are over rated.   Everyone seemed to be having a much better time than me.  Still they brought us all the fun things like rock ‘n roll, and drugs, and of course The Pill freed young women from the terrors of abortion and unwanted pregnancy, only to face them with the terrors of randy young toads like me, fresh out of 12 years of Boarding school.

It was all a very long time ago and I shan’t bore you, or even disgust you, with my memories.  I’m just a grateful customer of consumer planet Earth.

This isn’t an Award show but I’d like to thank (cue playoff Music) my wife, my son and daughter, my ex-wife, my family, my in-laws, my many friends and my Python colleagues.  In fact everybody except that short, twisted little bastard suing us…(Mercifully the music brings him to a close.)

It’s been a great time and I have enjoyed myself.

It is still an amazingly unlikely privilege to be born on this planet.  I treasure it every day.

Thanks for the memories.

Thanks for the ride.

And thanks to all you Fans, Trolls, Tweeters and Bloggers for all your kindness and good wishes.

Pope Eric of Redditch.

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