Sorry Mr M, but you misrepresent me yet again. Nowhere in this or any other correspondence have I suggested that you couldn't do hard physical manual labour. I said that I couldn't imagine.

Anyway, thanks for the correction. Your stint of sweating your brow was of course four months, not two years. Roughly from about now until Christmas in fact.

BTW., I've got nothing against people having been born with silver spoons in their mouths. It would hardly have been their fault when all's said and done. What I detest is the heritage of racial/biological/cultural Superiority which so many such people thought this gave them; and that the rest of us deserved the hovels and heartbreak to which our lowly status befitted us.

And your old man never rose to anything more than deputy editorship of a small specialised newspaper? There was me thinking you were one of the bourgeoisie. By all the riches in the kingdom of heaven, as one of my Gaelic speaking forebears might not have said, We surely do live and learn.