It's amazing the things you end up wishing you'd done something about at the time.

When I was an apprentice I went out on a job with my foreman. On the way back he announced that he was going to call in on an old farmer he knew, an ex-IRA man., who'd fought in the war of independence. I asked if the guy was Irish and my foreman said "No. He's English, but he got fed up with the dirty end of the stick that the Irish were getting and he decided to go over there and lend them a hand."

I was extremely shy and naive in those days, and I'd never heard of oral history. In fact, I don't think it even existed as a recognised discipline that far back, so I never did anything about it.

A few years later, this old bloke's farm was bulldozed to make room for a motorway and his memories of the troubles are now lying in a grave somewhere. Sad.

Some years later I was working in a civil engineering site office, along with a Mexican draughtsman called Eduardo. Eduardo hated General Franco, who at that time was coming to the end of his reign as Spain's only fascist dictator.

When I asked why, he explained that his father had been the Spanish Prime Minister at the time of Franco's coup, and that was why he and the rest of the family had ended up in Mexico. Unfortunately, with work commitments and whatnot, I never got the chance to follow up that conversation. But who knows what historical nuggets might have been uncovered.