Category: Computing

A low point in Greenland

The photo shows a valley in Greenland, a valley is a low point, but Trump’s arrogant rudeness was another kind of low-point, and his falsifications were low-points as well.

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Image of the day – 186

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

Greenland (click images to enlarge)

A huge rumpus has developed over Mr Trump’s fixation on owning Greenland. I’ve never been to Greenland, but I’ve seen many photos and read accounts by people who have visited or who live there. It’s a large island with hospitable inhabitants but a very inhospitable climate, mostly covered by an ice cap up to 3 km (2 miles) deep, and peopled by a rich mix of the hardy Inuit natives of the land and Danes. The photo shows a valley in Greenland, a valley is a low point, but Trump’s arrogant rudeness was another kind of low-point, and his falsifications were low-points as well.

The rumpus continued until Trump backed down, but in his Davos address and press conference Trump said many things that did not ring true in my ears and mind so I wanted to see a fact-check.

What follows was not written by me. It’s Chat GPT’s response to my request for the AI to read the transcript, fact-check the claims, and draft a 1000-word essay for me. I planned to edit it into a finished article to publish here, but I decided instead to publish the draft as is.

Read it below: ChatGPT as a guest author on my blog.

Here’s my request to ChatGPT:

Please examine President Trump’s Davos press conference, fact check his claims and draft a 1000 word essay based on your findings.

Feel free to put this prompt into an AI of your choosing, the output will vary between AIs and may change over time as well.

Fact-Checking President Trump’s Davos Speech and Press Conference

Introduction

In January 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump delivered a highly anticipated speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, and later faced questions at a press conference. His address was notable not only for its bold proclamation of U.S. ambitions — especially regarding Greenland — but also for a wide array of controversial and, in many cases, misleading or incorrect claims about international relations, economics, and domestic policy. This essay examines the context of the speech, fact-checks key assertions, and evaluates the broader implications of the rhetoric deployed.

A Controversial Theme: Greenland and U.S. Expansionism

Perhaps the most eye-catching aspect of Trump’s Davos address was his discussion of Greenland, the vast Arctic island that is an autonomous territory of Denmark. Trump reiterated his desire for the United States to acquire Greenland, labeling it “critical” to U.S. and NATO security. He also — for the first time in this campaign — publicly pledged not to use military force to obtain it. – Time

However, this position was controversial for multiple reasons:

  • International Law and Sovereignty: Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark; any transfer of sovereignty must be voluntary and negotiated. Danish leaders have consistently rejected selling or ceding control of the territory. – AP
  • Misrepresentation of Defense History: Trump implied that the U.S. “gave Greenland back” after World War II. In reality, the U.S. military presence in Greenland was based on agreements that affirmed Denmark’s sovereignty over the island while allowing the U.S. strategic access — but Greenland was not “returned” in the sense of ending U.S. ownership, because it was never wholly U.S. territory. – MediaITE
  • Strategic Importance vs. Imperialism: Trump’s framing of Greenland as a necessary bulwark against global threats was criticized as overly nationalistic and potentially destabilizing for NATO unity. European leaders stressed sovereignty and peaceful cooperation. – Guardian

Although Trump’s explicit rejection of military force was welcomed by markets and some commentators, the overall push was seen as a diplomatic provocation rather than constructive strategy. – Time

Misleading and False Claims

Beyond Greenland, Trump’s remarks included a number of statements that were factually inaccurate or misleading. Fact-checkers from multiple outlets documented significant issues:

1. NATO Contributions and Benefits

Trump characterized NATO as a burden on the United States, asserting the U.S. “never got anything” out of the alliance. This framing ignores both measurable benefits and longstanding structural agreements:

  • The U.S. does bear a large share of NATO defense spending, but it does not pay 100% of it; in 2024, U.S. defense spending comprised roughly 60-plus percent of total NATO expenditure. – NewsChannel3-12
  • NATO membership delivers both strategic security for the U.S. and economic and political stability among allies, which benefit U.S. interests. – NewsChannel3-12

2. Wind Energy and China

Trump derided renewable energy efforts, particularly wind power, and claimed he couldn’t find evidence of wind farms in China. This is demonstrably false:

  • China ranks first in the world in installed wind power capacity, with roughly 40–45 percent of global capacity. – Reddit

Such misstatements underscore pervasive misunderstandings about energy infrastructure.

3. Trade and Economic Claims

Trump’s economic narrative included assertions about U.S. trade imbalances and export markets that were incorrect:

  • He claimed the European Union does not buy American farm products and automobiles, implying that U.S. exports are negligible. In fact, the EU is a major market for U.S. agricultural exports and is among the top vehicle export destinations for U.S. manufacturers. – WRALNews

Additional claims about trade deficits — especially exaggerated figures about China and Canada — were similarly misleading when evaluated against official trade statistics. – WRALNews

4. Election and Historical Falsehoods

During the speech, Trump reiterated the claim that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was “rigged.” This assertion has been conclusively debunked by multiple courts, election officials, and independent fact-checkers. – HindustanTimes

Furthermore, in discussing geopolitical conflicts, Trump mischaracterized some historical events (e.g., conflating diplomatic tensions or border disputes with actual wars). – MediaITE

Economic Performance and Domestic Policy

Trump also touted U.S. economic performance under his administration, claiming low inflation and high growth. While inflation has been reduced from peaks seen earlier in the decade, some of Trump’s accompanying statistics — like headline growth figures and the scale of investment commitments — were overstated compared with independent economic data. – NewsWeek

His framing of U.S. economic strength was intended to contrast with his characterisation of the previous administration, though key metrics show that inflation, growth, and market performance fluctuate due to broader global and domestic conditions, not solely presidential policies. – NewsWeek

Rhetoric, Reactions, and Implications

Trump’s Davos speech was met with a mixture of shock, criticism, and, in some quarters, applause for his combative posture. European leaders, especially from Denmark and the EU, expressed concern about his Greenland remarks and his critiques of European energy and economic policy. – Guardian

Financial markets reacted positively to the pledge not to use force in pursuing Greenland, but broader geopolitical analysts warned that pushing such rhetoric in a forum dedicated to economic cooperation risked undermining U.S. credibility. – Time

Conclusion

President Trump’s appearance at the 2026 World Economic Forum was consequential — not just for its content but for the contradictions and controversies it generated. While his call for U.S. leadership and economic strength resonated with some domestic audiences, the fact-checking analysis reveals that many claims were inaccurate, misrepresented complex facts, or repeated debunked narratives. The emphasis on territorial ambitions like Greenland, along with misstatements about trade, energy, and alliances, highlights the challenges of integrating nationalist and transactional rhetoric into forums predicated on multilateral cooperation.

In sum, the Davos speech stands as a stark example of how high-level international engagement can be shaped as much by political theatre and domestic audience signaling as by policy substance — and the importance of grounding such speeches in verifiable facts if they are to foster trust and constructive global dialogue.

See also:

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Enough is enough
Truth still matters
A conversation with ChatGPT

Time for a new paradigm

Times change and businesses and organisations have to change too. You see the same situation in ecosystems: weather patterns change, or a new species of plant or animal moves in, and the balance shifts.

Wikipedia’s entry on Patreon

Thinking out loud – 4

Patreon on Wikipedia

Times change and businesses and organisations have to change too. You see the same situation in ecosystems: weather patterns change, or a new species of plant or animal moves in, and the balance shifts. Plants and animals that used to thrive begin to struggle or even die out, others prosper.

Internet conditions have been changing, and continue to do so. YouTube, pressured by the popularity of Tik-Tok style short video clips is bringing YouTube ‘shorts’ front and centre, and longer, more serious videos are both more expensive to host (because they are longer, slower to upload, and need more storage), and less popular with younger audiences (a recently growing sector.) Blogs have become less popular for the same reasons. Print media have been suffering too, everyone wants video reports on current events. Even TV channels are suffering, seen as boring and not for the current generation.

So what to do when the old models fail? That was the issue Fraser Cain faced.

Here’s a story of frustration and hard work when a website failed, revenues had been trending downwards for some time and the YouTube part of the operation proved problematic for a different reason. The solution? Patreon, and a new (old) approach to funding. Watch Fraser Cain’s video below where he shares the full story of the website failure and reconstruction, the problem with YouTube, and the new emphasis on Patreon going forward.

Patreon

The answer, as you have seen, was to find a new model; or perhaps it’s just an even older model come back in disguise! Provide material, perhaps in large part for free, but then charge a weekly or monthly subscription for extras. These might be coverage in greater depth, providing additional topics, giving an opportunity to provide feedback, or win prizes, or sell ‘merch’, or whatever other benefits you might think of.

Patreon is becoming more and more popular with creators, and for very good reason – the model is extremely successful. It works well for creators, and it works well for viewers who can enjoy an ad-free experience. Not everyone will be willing to pay for the extras, but that doesn’t matter. As long as the income exceeds the costs of production it’s a success. so the more people a creator can sign up, the lower the fee can become. It’s a great idea, it works for everyone.

See also:

Here are some further links to Fraser’s material, as well as a few other content creators using Patreon very effectively:

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Being hacked

The flurry of ‘your password has been changed’ announcements grew and grew, and was then joined by texts and emails telling me I could gain access to my account again using this or that six-digit key.

I was hacked! I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’m usually quite careful and it’s the first time it’s happened to me. The hacker(s) seemed mostly to be interested in websites that might give them access to money in some shape or form. An understandable motive. You don’t want to be hacked, it’s taken several days of hard effort to drag myself clear, and although the activity has dropped to a very low level now, it might still be too soon to feel completely safe.

Here’s what happened as far as I can tell.

I was browsing around on Patreon, noting the range of people running businesses, charitable sites, enthusiast groups, news and comment on specialist topics and so forth.

I spotted one site offering advice on the digital currency market, an idea that has always intrigued me. And somehow I managed to click through to links to sign up – mistakenly imagining they were just for more information. I soon got a charge on my PayPal account, quite a large charge that I couldn’t at first identify except that it came from Patreon. When I understood that to be the case I went into my Patreon account and discovered (to my horror) that I was now a member of the advice site I thought I’d been browsing.

It didn’t take long to unsubscribe myself, and apart from a second, much smaller, Patreon payment through PayPal, that seemed to be the end of the matter. But then further payments appeared, but each one was rolled back by Patreon to my PayPal account, presumably because I was no longer a member of the account and there was some lag in the process.

After that (and I don’t know whether there’s a connection between what had already happened and what happened next) I began to receive password change announcements from a range of sites I use. PayPal was the first so I contacted them and they refunded a payment I’d queried because they judged it to be fraudulent. But the flurry of ‘your password has been changed’ announcements grew and grew, and was then joined by texts and emails telling me I could gain access to my account again using this or that six-digit key.

At that point I became very suspicious. Why were these access key messages coming to me? Someone had put false passwords into some of my sites and then used the ‘I forgot my password option’. But they hadn’t been able to login. They knew my email address (often the username) and so did the website, so the access key came to me. But if I was to enter one of them, the site would let the hacker in – not me. This happened with PayPal, Patreon, Buy Me A Coffee, Microsoft, Etsy and several more.

I’ve had a bit of a fright, lost some money (not catastrophically, but annoyingly) and have had to spend a lot of time getting everything straightened out. The flow of emails and texts has diminished now, just one or two this evening. If I have a week or two without any sign of activity I shall heave a big sigh of relief.

I’ve been through all the passwords in my password manager, removing sites that I never use or are no longer available, changing all reused passwords, and making sure all that remain are strong (long, random, containing both upper and lower case, numerals, and special characters). The password manager generates and stores these for me and can log me in automatically on most sites.

I’m looking forward to relaxing again in time, but for the moment I’m still being vigilant.

See also:

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The Wayback Machine

So let’s look at some examples… But do bear in mind that the retrieval process may be quite slow. Time travel takes time.

Time travel would be interesting, but we can be pretty sure it can’t be done. However, history lets us visit the past in a sense. And when it comes to the web, there’s always the amazing Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine archives websites and stores them for future use, and anyone can use it to see past versions of sites, or visit sites that are no longer available. Also, anyone can enter a web address and ask for it to be archived.

The Wayback Machine has had a torrid time with DDoS attacks and data theft over the last few weeks, but it’s all fixed and working again as of 14th October (though in read-only mode for the time being).

So let’s look at some examples. Click the links below to check them out, but do bear in mind that the retrieval process may be quite slow. Time travel takes time:

Why not explore some old websites for yourself? Just visit web.archive.org and search for a website you like or one that no longer exists.

What serious uses does it have?

The Wayback Machine (or Web Archive) serves a number of useful purposes beyond viewing old versions of websites for fun.

  • Historical research
  • For checking accountability
  • Verification
  • As legal evidence
  • Viewing websites that no longer exist

For further details, read the Wikipedia article on the Wayback Machine.

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How life begins

The gap has been closing little by little from both the astronomical and biological sides. But though it’s narrower now than ever before, it’s still a gap.

How did life begin? It seems possible, even very likely, that simple chemistry has the potential to generate life given the right conditions and plenty of time.

There’s always been a big puzzle over the origin of life here on Earth. Life is everywhere and in a vast array of forms. From the simplest archaea and bacteria, to the giant redwood and the humble grass in the field, the blue whale down to the smallest mite. So rich in variety, so wide in its presence from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains. Life is amazing!

The processes of evolution are well understood and impossible to deny; so puzzles over the many forms of life, its adaptability, and changes in the forms we see coming and going over deep time are clearly understood and well explained by biologists. (When did you last see a dinosaur?)

But how did it all start?

Ah! That has always been the unexplained mystery. Once we have a simple, replicating form of life on the planet we can see it might thrive, spread and grow in complexity.

There are various proposals. Perhaps it arrived in an asteroid kicked off Mars or somewhere else. But that does no more than move the origin to a different place in the Solar System. Maybe it all began at mid-ocean ridges where hot mineral-laden springs flow from hot rock layers below the surface. Perhaps, yes.

We know that many of the precursors for life exist out among the stars. Here in the Solar System, comets and asteroids are often richly endowed with amino acids, ribonucleotides, and all sorts of smaller precursors. These are the building blocks of proteins, RNA, DNA and so forth. We understand how these precursors can form spontaneously given simpler materials like water, methane, ammonia, compounds including atoms of phosphorus, sulphur and so forth. It just takes chance interactions, time, and a source of energy like ultraviolet light. The basic ingredients are there in the gas clouds that condense to form new stars and the material orbiting in disks around them.

All of these things are fairly well understood, but there’s a gap in our understanding between the presence of the components and the presence of life. The gap has been closing little by little from both the astronomical and biological sides. But though it’s narrower now than ever before, it’s still a gap.

Life in a computer?

Well, yes! And, no.

Some clever work by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a Google vice-president of engineering, has uncovered an intriguing process. Setting a very simple ‘machine’ running random code (no meaningful program whatsoever) and waiting for something to happen, shows that eventually some very simple self-replicating code will appear in the system, and once it exists it replicates very quickly and then slowly increases in complexity. It’s not biological life of course, but it has all the qualities that we would recognise as lifelike. It replicates itself, different forms of replicating code compete with one another, they evolve, and they grow more and more complex. This doesn’t show us in any detail how biological forms got started, but it demonstrates that self-replication could happen in principle, and given enough time that it’s almost inevitable.

For the detail and background you should listen to Sean Carroll interviewing Blaise, the conversation is absolutely fascinating.

See also:

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Why I finally ditched X

Bluesky … reminds me of Twitter in those early days, with quite polite conversation on all sorts of topics that interest me.

X (used to be Twitter) is no longer one of the sites I use. Not only have I stopped using it, but I also closed down my account. I joined Twitter in 2008 and for more than 15 years it served me very well indeed. But since Elon Musk bought it, the service it offers has become less and less what I want or need.

Bluesky logo
(Mediawiki)

There are a number of alternatives, and I’ve chosen Bluesky. It reminds me of Twitter in those early days, with quite polite conversation on all sorts of topics that interest me. The major drawback currently is that there are only 6 million or so users, but the numbers are growing quickly now, especially here in the UK. In July 2023 there were 200 thousand users, twelve moths later in July 2024 this had grown to 5.9 million, an increase of nearly thirty times. It’s a long, long way short of X’s 192.5 million. Another increase of thirty times this year would put Bluesky on almost the same number of users as X; that’s not going to happen, but realistically it might grow by another 3, 4, or 5 times. And who knows what will happen in 2026, 2027…

So what, in the end, made me leave?

There are several factors.

  • I used Twitter as a very up-to-the-minute news source. Type in the name of any town, for example, and up would pop the latest posts by anyone there at the time. This was also great for learning about ongoing events – the Olympics, Cricket, the Russo-Ukrainian war. That no longer works on X, the news function is cluttered up with so much nonsense and opinion that it’s no longer useful in that way – at least, not to me.
  • Arrogant rudeness, sometimes of the most extreme kind. It’s everywhere on X but very rare on Bluesky. Often, on X, posts like this are targeted spam (see the next item).
  • Spam, sometimes targeted to a receptive group of some kind, sometimes just random. There seems to be a lot of this on X these days. I don’t know about you, but I can do without spam!
  • Misinformation and disinformation is problematic on X. So anything you read may or may not be true.
  • I like watching YouTube videos and I dare say you do too. SpaceX used to post their rocket launches in high definition on YouTube, but now they’ve moved to X, initially in lower quality. SpaceX’s progress is something I want to keep track of, but from now on I’ll be watching these developments on third-party YouTube channels like Everyday Astronaut, Marcus House, NASA Spaceflight, WAI, and others.

Bluesky and other social networks suffer from the same issues to varying degrees. But Bluesky has strong policies and controls in place, they seem to me to be far more effective than any such controls in X. For more information on how Bluesky is designed and managed, read the Wikipedia article about it.

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Quick note on AGI

Following my recent post on AGI dangers (AGI – Hopeful and less hopeful news) I want to draw attention to a Guardian podcast that I think everyone should listen to.

The podcast discusses whether it may be possible to develop AGI without causing an existential threat to humanity. This is a hugely important issue, we all need to be informed and we should all have an opinion.

AGI – Hopeful and less hopeful news

Personally, I think the threat is real and potentially impossible to stop with very little time for effective countermeasures.

It’s fair to say that few people are currently thinking about the future of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Those who do are mostly researchers and engineers working on the topic.


Wikipedia article – Existential risk from artificial general intelligence

The hope is based around alignment, a term used broadly to mean the degree to which an AGI can be made to conform to human goals and objectives. Poorly aligned AGI would probably be diasastrous and unsafe, well aligned AGI might be beneficial and safe. And let’s be clear at the outset: there are concerns about how AGI (and even current technology like ChatGPT) will cause disruption and harm by affecting social behaviour or employment in the way new technologies have done in the past. But that’s not what we are addressing here. The more significant thinking is about the existential threat to humanity. Will an AGI spell the end, will it render humans extinct?

Nor are we discussing here whether or not it will be possible to develop an AGI, some people argue not, that there’s some kind of unbridgeable leap between current AI systems and an intelligent system with thoughts, ideas of its own, and self-awareness. But we know this is incorrect; such a system has already been created by evolution – humans! This level of intelligence is achievable and it’s already been done. It may take time, it might not be easy, but developments in neural networks and related systems will lead to AGI sooner or later. ChatGPT can already write workable computer code – just think about that for a moment.

The hopeful news

The hopeful news comes from OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT and the GPT software behind it. They have found that process supervision produces better results than outcome supervision. And this gives us a much better chance of understanding how the AI makes its choices. Process supervision feeds back on the quality of the interim stages of an AI’s processing; but outcome supervision feeds back on only the quality of the final result.

Understanding how an AGI works might help developers build in robust alignment features; and if process supervision is more effective than alternatives, it stands a good chance of being employed by developers.

The less hopeful news

The unhopeful news comes from discussions about the nature of risk and human thinking about risk, expressed in discussions on LESSWRONG and elsewhere.

Closing thoughts

Currently, only a very small number of people are concerned about a possible existential threat from AGI. But most of the people with that concern are some of the same people that have knowledge and experience of AGI, what AI can currently do, and how quickly the systems might advance and escape our control.

Personally, I think the threat is real and potentially impossible to stop with very little time for effective countermeasures. But I also think it might just be possible to avoid the danger, but only if we have binding international agreements and strong oversight. However, I further suspect that it might be impossible to agree those necessary measures completely enough, rigorously enough, or fast enough to be fully effective.

In my judgement we are on rather shaky ground, and the more people who give this serious thought as soon as possible, the better. When the stakes are so very high there can be no such thing as too careful or too thorough.

See also:

The end of humanity?

For such an alarming topic it’s a remarkably calm discussion, but also a very informative and thought-provoking conversation.

The rise of AI and the possibility (some would say certainty) that this means the end of human civilisation and the extinction of our species, are topics being seriously warned against by a number of thinkers, scientists, and AI experts.

Artificial General Intelligence – Image from Wikimedia

The Guardian discusses these issues with ‘the father of AI’, Geoffrey Hinton.

Listen to the podcast and see what you think. The potential end of humanity is not something to be swept under the carpet. We need to think about it right now. It would be extraordinarily foolish to wait, it might already be too late. For such an alarming topic it’s a remarkably calm discussion, but also a very informative and thought-provoking conversation.

I believe everyone should have the chance to listen to this.

See also:

Blast from the past… 6

In May 1993 we made some very large bubbles in the back garden.

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Notes from bygone years – May without limits

A year ago

In May 2022 we visited St Neots in Cambridgeshire, our home town before moving to Cirencester where we live today. We were visiting friends for a big party in their local village hall.

Pretending to be on a tropical beach

The whole thing was themed for a Caribbean feel, and we all had our photos taken against a backdrop of palm fronds, a golden beach, and sparkling sea dotted with distant islands.

<Apr 2022 – Jun 2022>

Two years ago

In May 2021 I took a photo of this plaque in Black Jack Street, Cirencester. It commemorates 1900 years of the town’s existence, founded by the Roman invaders in 75 AD. I wonder what they’d make of it now?

The phoenix rising from the ashes has long been Cirencester’s emblem. Corinium, as the Romans called it, was a frontier settlement in 75 AD and the years immediately following, but it grew to become the regional capital of south western Britain – the province of Britannia Prima.

Wikipedia has a good article about Corinium.

<Apr 2021 – Jun 2021>

Five years ago

In May 2018 I wrote about the work going on in our new house. The builders had done much of the work on the new extensions, but nothing was finished yet and a lot of our possessions were inaccessible – including our summer clothes. And the weather was getting warmer and warmer!

Our partly liveable house

If you’d like to know more, read the original article.

<Apr 2018 – Jun 2021>

Ten years ago

In May 2013 I was reading ‘The Shaping of Things to Come’, an excellent book by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. Amongst other things, they remark on the fact that Jesus was a Jew, the New Testament was written almost entirely by Jewish authors (the exception being Luke), and the earliest church (in Jerusalem) was Jewish in nature too. If we are to understand Jesus, the New Testament, and the church, we have to pay attention to their Jewishness. Read the original post.

<Apr 2013 – Jun 2013>

Fifteen years ago
The ‘Sagrada Familia’

May 2008 – We had a holiday in Catalonia and visited Barcelona where we took a look at the famous Sagrada Familia with its amazing ‘biological’ shapes. What an astonishing place it is!

To learn more about this wonderful feat of design and engineering by the architect Antoni Gaudi, read the Wikipedia article.


<Apr 2008 – Jun 2008>

Twenty years ago

In May 2003 I was reminded about the significance of rivers and their behaviour and about the river in the books of Ezekiel and Revelation. Life is not about the mundane things we do from day to day, and we don’t get far by our own abilities. Real life has an essentially spiritual focus. I wrote a blog post about a meeting that helped me see these things more clearly.

<Apr 2003 – Jun 2003>

Twenty-five years ago

May 1998 saw me designing an automated news website for internal use by research teams at Unilever. I’d only been in the job for a month, and I already had an overall mechanism in mind and was working on the programming required.

<Apr 1998 – Jun 1998>

Thirty years ago

In May 1993 we made some very large bubbles in the back garden. We had a special bubble-making kit with a large fabric loop on the end of a wand. It was an amazing process! The picture shows my daughter Beth and nephew Tom experimenting with a bubble.

<Apr 1993 – Jun 1993>

Thirty-five years ago

In May 1988 I was working at Long Ashton Research Station near Bristol, developing techniques for imaging water droplets on waxy leaves by rapid freezing and scanning electron microscopy. This led to a paper on the topic.

<No earlier data – Jun 1988>

Forty years ago

It’s May 1983 and time for the annual school fete; my daughter Beth and her friend Vicky were in fancy dress, walking with their teacher.

How time flies – my grandchildren are older now than my children were then.

<No earlier data – Jun 1983>

Forty-five years ago

In May 1978 I borrowed a friend’s car (we didn’t have a car at the time) and drove with a very excited daughter to visit her baby sister at Bristol Maternity Hospital.

<No earlier data – Jun 1978>

Fifty years ago

In May 1973 Mum and Dad visited us for the day and we spent some time in Clevedon. Here’s Dad taking photos on the rocky shoreline.

<No earlier data – Jun 1973>

Fifty-five years ago

In May 1968 I was in lodgings in Pershore, working on a fruit and vegetable farm nearby as part of my undergraduate degree at Bath University. It was a sandwich course in horticulture, and the summers were the industrial experience part of the course.

<No earlier data – Jun 1968>

Sixty years ago

May 1963 and I was in my fifth year at Cirencester Grammar School.

<No earlier data – Jun 1963>

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