I’ve just been reading up on folic acid at UK Flour Millers, the trade body that represents the UK flour industry. You’ll never guess what. It turns out that folic acid is ‘safe and effective.’

Here’s the full paragraph, in case you don’t believe me:

Following consultation with public health experts and medical professionals, the UK government has implemented regulation to fortify non-wholemeal, wheat flour with folic acid. This is a common fortification policy and has been in place for years in many countries, such as Australia and Canada. It has been shown to be safe and effective in reducing the incidence of severe birth defects in babies.

Safe and effective. If that isn’t a phrase to inspire confidence then I don’t know what’s wrong with you. You’re probably one of those idiots with a death wish who endangered your own health - not to mention granny’s life - by refusing to take those Covid vaccines recommended a few years back by top medical experts such as the UK’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty.

Whitty (who was in the same year as me at school, though I don’t recall exchanging a single word with him, which I think speaks volumes for what a mark he must have made) is also the man responsible for pushing through the UK government’s legislation on folic acid. From December 2026, with only a few exceptions, flour sold in the UK must now be adulterated with this ‘safe and effective’ substance.

Except folic acid is not safe or effective. As pathologist and campaigner Dr Claire Craig explains to me on my latest podcast, folic acid is just about survivable if you are a lab rat but it is really not good for humans. It’s dangerous for cancer sufferers; it causes autism in children; it’s disastrous if you have pernicious anaemia; it can cause anaphylactic shock; and you definitely don’t want to take it if you’ve had a coronary stent fitted. Even the National Health Service (NHS) admits most of this on its website. It tried to take the information down - presumably under orders - but someone complained and, remarkably, the information was reinstated.

You also need to avoid the stuff if you carry the variant in the MTHFR gene which impairs the conversion of synthetic folic acid into the active form your cells can actually use. You really don’t want unmetabolised folic acid accumulating in your bloodstream. A randomised trial found men taking 1mg/day of synthetic folic acid had nearly doubled prostate cancer incidence of the placebo group over ten years. Other studies have suggested that folic acid in fact trebles the prostate cancer risk.

Oh, and it doesn’t even do the thing it’s supposed to do, which is save more babies than it kills. On the contrary, according to the only large randomised trial for pregnant women, for every neural-tube defect it prevented there were nine foetal deaths.

Read up on all the evidence for yourself at www.fauxlate.org. It’s mind boggling. You might think, “Oh come on! No way would they get away with contaminating the food supply with something this toxic if there weren’t at least one measurable benefit!” Nope. So comprehensive is the case against folic acid, it feels - not for the first time, it must be said - as if the people pushing it are taking the mickey.

“Well we successfully conned them into taking an experimental vaccine that made loads of them drop dead from blood clots, heart attacks and turbo cancer. How do we beat that?”

“How about poisoning their bread? That might be fun. And their cake, even better. The Great British Kill Off!”

“But what about all those carnivore and keto types who won’t eat bread or cake? Can we not find a way to kill them too, pretty please?”

“No. Those people are much more use to us alive. Every time someone tries to raise the folic acid issue on Twitter, up they’ll pop to boast about their own superior lifestyle choices.”

“Well they’re right, aren’t they?”

“Yes but incredibly smug and fantastically divisive. And a useful distraction from an argument that is supposed to be about grotesque state overreach not about how incredibly empowering it is when you’ve got half a dead cow stacked in your deep freeze.”

Folic acid is, to all intents and purposes, poison. So why are they forcing us to eat it?

Now there’s a question. But before I address it, I’d like briefly to dismiss the arguments raised by what Clare Craig calls the “let them eat quinoa” crowd. I’m personally suspicious of these responses, as I am of a lot of the contributions in online debate these days. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated AI, such conversations are now so heavily infiltrated with bots pushing the Enemy’s agenda that it wouldn’t at all surprise me to discover that these unhelpful comments were not being offered by real people in good faith.

But let’s suppose some of them genuine: what an extraordinary capitulation to the Enemy they represent! What these “I’m all right Jack!” types are saying is that they’re perfectly comfortable with everyone else having their diet toxified by government fiat because, hey, they are privy to the secret mysteries that give them the special tricks they need to stay alive while the ignorant masses get sick and die.

Is there not something a bit gnostic/Masonic elite about this position?

And do they really care so little about the plight of ordinary people?

I’m Awake. I know about the importance of a good diet - avoiding seed oils, refined sugar, and, now, products made with contaminated flour - but I also know that, sadly, this is very much a minority preoccupation. Most of the people I encounter every day, including some friends and family, are going to be ingesting quantities of folic acid from now on because they know no better. This doesn’t give me a feeling of “serves you right!” smugness. Rather, it makes me feel horrified at all the extra debilitating health problems these poor saps are now going to have piled on top of the ones they already suffer from having taken those multiple shots.

Nor am I persuaded by the idea that taking or not taking folic acid is really going to be such a doddle. What about, as I did the other day at my Dad’s wake, you find yourself in a situation where the only eating option is sandwiches? You gonna sit there, superior and judgy and antisocial, while everyone else nibbles away.

Or what if you’re out and about - travelling long distances, maybe even flying - and you’re starving and you need to grab something quick, and there’s nothing available that doesn’t involve bread?

Or you’re being friendly and you are meeting someone for coffee in one of those artisanal bakery cafes that are so desperately fashionable right now, among the young especially. Are you going to be the kill-joy who says: “None of those award winning croissants for me, thank you very much. And none of that sourdough either. My body is my temple. And oh, by the way, you do realise that coffee is really shit for you too?”

No. The only decent response to this folic acid abomination is to call it out for what it is: a calculating, cynical act of the purest evil.

The case against compulsory folic acid is unanswerable: which is why the functionaries pushing this legislation through made damn sure they didn’t have to answer it. They forced through the regulation by Statutory Instrument, meaning that no one, either in or outside parliament, had any chance to object.

Clare Craig wants everyone to sign her petition asking the government to reconsider. I’ve signed out of solidarity - but not in the belief that it will make the slightest bit of difference. The government - though of course, it was never really their decision: they’re just minions - know that all they have to do is brazen it out and lie relentlessly and eventually the problem will disappear.

How do they get away with this?

Because most people still trust the System. They have been brought up to believe, for example, that if their government forces through new legislation effectively mandating the consumption of a particular man-made substance there’s just no way something like that would happen if it weren’t basically OK for us. So: no need to kick up too much of a fuss; if it were really that bad someone would be doing something about it.

We Awake types may rail at this state of affairs as much as we like. But this - even after all those lessons everyone supposedly learned during ‘Covid’ - remains the default state of the vast majority of the population. They’re like turkeys gobbling contentedly in their pen, as Thanksgiving or Christmas approaches, fully confident that good old Farmer Giles has got their back because he’s a lovely guy with a jolly smile and feeds them regularly - and killing turkeys just isn’t something someone like that would do. “I mean, if he were, we’d know, right?” you can imagine one turkey saying. “Oh bloody hell, absolutely. And you’ve got to remember, with all these rules and regulations about treatment of farmyard animals, and all this vegetarianism that’s so fashionable now, I doubt it would even be legal for him to kill us, even he wanted to”, Turkey Two would sagely reply.

This is just the kind of misplaced trust that the baddies who run the world find so very useful when they’re trying to get one over on us. They can rely on us not to read the small print. That’s because we assume that someone else will already have done it on our behalf. A lawyer maybe: one of those lawyers who are really into justice, as of course so many lawyers are. Or a scientific expert at one of those regulatory organisations that scrutinise medicines, food safety and so on. Or a campaigning journalist: they can always be relied on to speak truth to power! Or maybe an opposition MP seizing the opportunity to show up government incompetence.

The problem with all these saviour figures is that they don’t actually exist. Or rather they do - but only in the collective imagination. This collective imagination is a figment conjured up by an eco-system - education; the entertainment industry; the media - designed by the elites with the primary purpose of keeping the useless folic acid eaters in a state of deluded complacency.

To understand all this is, like fear of the Lord, the beginning of wisdom.

But we’re currently still so lamentably far from attaining universal enlightenment that even some of our doughtiest campaigners aren’t quite with the programme.

Clare Craig for example. I think she’s decent, honest, hard-working and sincere. It must have taken great courage for her, as a senior pathologist working in the NHS, to speak out against some of the Establishment bullshit on ‘Covid.’ I’m grateful to her for the work she has done to expose the folic acid scam.

Still, I understand the reservations of more hardcore Awake types. Craig maintains that ‘Covid’ was a genuine new virus and not, as I believe and probably most of you believe, that it was a fake crisis cooked up in order to push vaccines. My guess here is that Craig is still to some extent a product of what the French call “la deformation professionelle.” That is, while she has tried in good faith to distance herself from the more egregious dishonesties of the medical establishment, she still can’t help subscribing to some of its shibboleths because that’s how she was trained.

She also believes in the official Holocaust narrative. I don’t, which prompted Craig to accuse me of taking contrary positions just to gain attention. This is unfair and untrue but I don’t hold it against her because I consider her unwitting slander to be a classic example of what I call a ‘Normie Cope.’

A Normie Cope is how people with at least one foot in the mainstream invariably respond when you tell them something ‘conspiratorial’ that clashes with their ingrained belief system. Rather than engage with what you are saying, rather than consider the awful possibility that you might be correct, they find an excuse simply to wave away your message so as to stay living within the paradigm they find so comforting.

There’s a gem of a Substack essay by Unbekoming on this subject which I highly recommend called The Guards Who Love You. Using the movie The Truman Show as its revelation-of-the-method model, it explains why mothers submit their babies to vaccine schedules even when all their maternal instincts tell them that this is what has been injuring their child. Like Truman they have been trained not to believe the evidence of their own eyes.

It is subtitled ‘An Essay on Why the Evidence Doesn’t Wake Anyone Up.’ What it has to say about mothers and vaccines applies equally well to the subject of folic acid. In both cases, we have a near-compulsory faux-medical intervention whose benefits have never convincingly been proven but whose detriments are legion and well documented. And in both cases we have a prevailing culture which not only doggedly insists that the serial killer isn’t a threat but which actually leaves the back door unlocked, with a welcome note on the mat, and arrows pointing upstairs with a message saying: “I’m ASLEEP. In the bedroom.”

Is it not the purest definition of insanity that we allow ourselves to be culled in this way?

Well, yes. You could see it like that But that would be to blame the victim for the Mafia boss’s crime, which I don’t think is really fair.

The reason we go on allowing all this bad stuff to happen to us - fluoride in the water supply, folic acid in our bread, death jabs in our babies’ arms - is not because we’re innately stupid and lazy and gullible and compliant and deserving of everything that’s coming to us but because the Predator Class which feeds on us trained us to be this way.

The Predators took some of our best qualities - selflessness, optimism, a desire to shape an even better world for our children - and used them as a weapon against us. They sold these pharmaceutical inventions to us as ‘progress’ - something we should all get behind. They rebranded “adulteration” as “fortification”, using the magical powers inherent in language to persuade us that a poison would actually make us stronger. They used lobby groups and compliant newspaper Health Pages (in truth just the propaganda wing of Big Pharma) and the healthcare system repeatedly to bang home the message that folic acid is the essential prerequisite of healthy motherhood.

I’m not a pregnant mother and am not likely to be one. But even when you’re not the target market, it’s one of the most relentlessly enforced messages in public health. I think I was probably still at school - we’re talking the late Seventies, here - when I first heard of the (extremely rare) condition of spina bifida. Certainly by the time my own wife was pregnant, I would have been as mad keen as any other concerned husband to make sure she was taking those vital folic acid supplements as recommended by all doctors and nurses and the telly.

How do you resist this brainwashing? It’s not easy. Especially if you’ve been taught to think that brainwashing only exists in spy movies like The Ipcress File and The Manchurian Candidate.

Clare Craig says that the folic acid issue is ultimately an ‘ethical’ one.

“For the majority, in the absence of a benefit, the risk will outweigh the benefit.”

It’s a fair point but it’s one that concedes too much territory to the enemy. What it does is to reduce the issue to a cosy, sixth-form-level debate about moral philosophy: is it ethical that a medical intervention targeted at a minority should be allowed to impinge on the health of the majority? What are the acceptable limits of state power? etc.

Worse, it hints at the theoretical possibility that there really do exist forms of medication which, if forced on us by state fiat, might under certain circumstances exert a beneficial effect on some sections of the populace. Which I doubt very much. Not if I know anything at all about Rockefeller/Carnegie medicine.

No. The much more important point - indeed the only point that really matters, because everything else, frankly, is like trying to defeat the Minotaur by attempting to reason him out of his carnivorous voraciousness by quoting the Cretan legal code - is this: yet again They are deliberately poisoning us.

They are not poisoning us because - whoops! - they didn’t have access to the full information that might have enabled them to reach a better decision. They are not poisoning us because they’re a bit shaky on the concept of cost/benefit analysis. They are not poisoning us because they love babies and unborn children more than anything because they’re just so cute and important and, like, the future.

They are poisoning us because they want more of us to get sick and die.

That’s it. It’s really that simple.

And the more we contrive to persuade ourselves it’s not that simple, the easier we make their job and the longer we postpone the inevitable reckoning.

“How did you manage to keep it together at your Dad’s funeral?” some sympathetic souls have kindly asked. This was in response to a recent piece I wrote on the experience of delivering my father’s eulogy. I thought, rather than reply individually, that I would turn into it into another article which some of you might find helpful.

1. Celebrate the life rather than mourn the death

When I was planning my father’s funeral service, my immediate thought was to choose lots of appropriately sad music: Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’; poignant hymns like The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended; and so on. Luckily I realised that this would probably be a mistake.

At a funeral, the congregation is already sad enough that someone they love has died. You really don’t need to twist the knife by tormenting them with music guaranteed to reduce them to tears: the tears will flow quite naturally anyway.

So for the intro music, I chose something jaunty: The Dambusters March by Eric Coates. As well as being an affectionate nod to my Dad’s National Service career (when he served in the RAF), it’s a popular, jolly, sturdy tune that puts a smile on your face. This made wheeling the coffin down the aisle much less painful.

You probably need one solemn, slow hymn to acknowledge the gravity of the moment. My father had already settled this by naming Eternal Father, Strong to Save as his chosen hymn in the Death Book we gave him to fill in, at his leisure, while he was still alive and well. (Death Books are very useful. Every elderly person should have one: they’re your last chance to declare how you want to be buried, who you want delivering your eulogy, etc. They also forestall family arguments after you are gone: your wishes having been expressed, the decision already made).

But one depressing hymn is enough. The others should be rousing ones that offer everyone the chance to sing their hearts out and relieve some of that pent up emotion. We agreed on Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer and Jerusalem. We did wonder whether it was really appropriate to include two such belters. But Gary, the excellent vicar at Christ Church, Malvern, confirmed them as suitable choices. A funeral service, he explained, needs to move in waves: a quiet, contemplative, mournful bit in the middle, book-ended by outbursts of life-affirming, death-conquering exultation.

We played the old man out to the tune of JSB’s Sheep May Safely Graze. I mean, it’s such a classic why would you not?

2. Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

From the moment I woke up on the day of my father’s funeral, I knew I had but one mission: to give my beloved Daddy the send off he deserved. Just writing that word ‘Daddy’ has brought tears to my eyes, which is why it certainly wasn’t going to be allowed to sneak into my eulogy. My job was not to feel sorry for myself but to deliver an oration worthy of the man.

Also, I’m the eldest sibling. When you are the first born - of five - it’s a job for life. No matter how much your brothers and sisters may subsequently eclipse you in terms of fame, fortune or distinction, whenever you gather together you will always instinctively observe the pecking order you had as children. Therefore, as top dog, you have to set an example. You have to be like a Napoleonic-era naval captain on the quarterdeck of his ship-of-the-line. No matter if there is carnage all around you as your decks are swept with grape, your masts are shattered and your ensign is shredded into a tattered rag. Others may fall but you must keep a cool head.

3. Pretend It’s Not Happening

Of course, keeping a cool head is easier said than done. But for me it seemed to follow quite naturally from my decision to prioritise my delivery of the eulogy. I entered a kind of trance state in which I felt at one remove from the events around me. When the hearse rolled up with my father’s coffin inside, for example, I quickly fought off thoughts like: “Oh no. That’s my dead Pa in there and he’s not coming back.” Instead, I thought, “Gosh. This is all so intense I’m not even going to try to process it. I’m going to act as if it’s more like a dream.”

It works really well as a strategy, I find. The only problem is afterwards when you realise you haven’t really dealt with any of the emotional issues that might have been alleviated had you allowed yourself to sob and weep. Just now I had a relapse of my various ongoing health problems. Michelle, my wonderful osteo, said my cranial rhythms were so constricted it was as if I were suffering from concussion. She ascribed this - because she had come across it before with other patients - to unresolved grief.

4. Be a Christian

You should try this sometime, if you haven’t already. Having a strong Christian faith makes SUCH a big difference to how you see death. Not for one second, no not for one fraction of a second, have I imagined that I’m not going to be reunited with my father again at the Resurrection. This is a great comfort to me.

I realise that to an atheist this will seem merely like a delusional cope. But crazy as it may seem, we Christians genuinely believe this stuff. It’s not a position we’ve merely adopted because the Bible tells us so or because we find it to be an agreeable way of dealing with the fact that we’re all gonna die. No. Knowing that there’s an afterlife, that death has been conquered through Christ’s sacrifice, is the essence of everything we think and do. We don’t feel superior to those who think otherwise. Just a bit sorry for them because, goodness, it must be hard living in a world as increasingly demanding as this one and believing that this is all there is.

5. You Need Dick

Among the qualities I didn’t inherit from my father were a meticulous attention to detail and ability to organise things. Luckily my brother Dick did, which is why things went so smoothly. In military terms, I would be the greenhorn platoon commander desperate to find new ways of getting all his men shot; Dick is the grizzled sergeant who makes sure they don’t.

I had just two jobs - funeral service; eulogy - while Dick took upon himself at least a dozen, from collecting copies of death certificates, informing the various utilities, and booking the church and the grave slot, organising the wake - and the music and photos and sound equipment for our Dick and James tribute - to the tricksy business of dealing with a landlord who, understandably, would much prefer it if the estate went on paying rent for all eternity.

This is the advantage of coming from a large family where there is a range of children with different skill sets. I always knew that having lots of brothers and sisters was a blessing. But I never knew quite how much till my father’s death brought us all together more closely than ever.

So that’s my final piece of advice. If you can and it’s not too late: have lots of children!

I have just delivered the eulogy at my father’s funeral. Was it the most important speech of my life? Well, definitely up there. You only get one shot at giving your old man the send-off he deserves, so you need to get it right.

The temptation on these occasions - and this applies equally to events like daughters’ weddings, best man’s speeches etc - is to make your excuses in advance. “People will understand if I don’t deliver. These occasions are so fraught. You never know how you’re going to react,” you may tell yourself. Sure. But do you really want to spend the rest of your life castigating yourself for how much better you could have been?

You could, of course, play for safety. Type out your speech in advance and read it from a script. This will skirt a lot of potential pitfalls: you can rehearse it so you feel comfortable with it; you’ll have timed it so it won’t overrun; you’ll know you’re not going to say anything clumsy or embarrassing because, perhaps with the help of a trusted adviser, you will have carefully edited it in advance; you (or your paid speechwriter) will have tailored it perfectly with a beginning, middle and an end.

But you will never deliver much more than an average speech. This is first because, unless perhaps done by professional actors, scripted readings never sound as natural or engaging or easy-on-the-ear as unscripted ones. Second because a first-rate speech is a living, breathing thing which responds to the moment. And third because nothing is quite so stimulating to the creative impulse nor thrilling to the nervous system nor makes a speech so exciting to deliver as the terror of going out before an expectant audience and not knowing quite what you are going to say.

Obviously, you’ll need some idea of what you’re going to say. If you don’t know roughly what you want to say you shouldn’t be giving a speech. But this isn’t such a problem as you might think because you do already know what you want to say. What you want to say is the single most important thing that needs to be said about the given topic.

In the case of my father, for example, the important thing was this: he was very special.

But almost every one thinks their Dad is special. What I then had to do was work out what exactly made him so special. Otherwise, I would be in danger of regurgitating a splurge of platitudes and, worse, failing in the one job you have when delivering a funeral oration: capturing the measure of the man (or woman) whose life is being celebrated.

A few ideas came to mind. His bloody mindedness. His pathological aversion to following rules. His insatiable curiosity. His joyous discovery in 1965 when the first of his children was born was that his main purpose in life was to build an empire of Delingpoles.

My father loved being the Delingpole patriarch. (It’s a niche role. There really aren’t many of us). And he liked the idea that rather than preparing his children for the world, it was the world’s job to adapt itself to Delingpoles. Though his five children were all very different, they were very recognisably of the species.

That was my next conundrum. What does a Delingpole look like? I decided they had two defining qualities. One, a very distinctive sense of humour: sometimes warped, often inappropriate, invariably piss-taking. Two, a stubborn determination to be themselves regardless of the personal cost in terms of embarrassment, financial security or ability to gain social acceptance.

Now I had my main theme. I make it sound easy but this is only because I am writing about it after the event. What I haven’t yet mentioned is the hours and hours - and hours - of time I wasted, thrashing about in my head and devising all manner of extraneous verbiage which would end on the cutting room floor.

If I’d read a piece like the one I’m now writing, I could have saved myself an awful lot of trouble. The thing you need to keep in mind when you are constructing a speech is how little time you have to say what needs to be said. So there’s no room - or very little - for anything that is not essential to the main theme.

Oh, and don’t worry about jokes. Or off-the-cuff digressions. Or topical remarks. These will all occur to you naturally in the moment, once you’ve had a chance to assess your audience and the general mood. They don’t need to be worked up in advance: indeed they shouldn’t be because then they turn into darlings. And the only thing to do with darlings, you may remember, is to kill them.

With speeches - as with essays - you won’t go far wrong if you stick to the old, basic, tripartite structural rule:

First, say what you are going to say; then say it; then say what you have just said.

Rules are made to be broken, as we’ll see in a moment. But that one keeps you honest and focused on the task in hand, viz, not skittering around like a crazed dog looking for more exciting new ideas to cram in, but finding ways to amplify your main point so as to enable your audience more fully to appreciate it.

Remember, unlike you, your audience haven’t been living with this speech for the last umpteen weeks. This is their first exposure to it. So what may seem to you like overkill may to them feel more like light understatement bordering on incomprehensibility.

And given that your audience are mainly the people on whom the success of your speech stands or falls, you want them onside. This means not just giving them a line of argument they can clearly follow - even if they are elderly and half deaf, which is not uncommon among funeral congregations - but also making them feel wanted and part of the occasion.

That’s why, early on in my address - but not before I’d got over The Hump - I told everyone present that they were part of the family. “Today you are all honorary Delingpoles”, I said. And I meant it because the fact that they’d all turned out to say goodbye to my father on the hottest day of the year told me all I needed to know: that all of these people were discerning enough to have recognised something special in my father; likely he felt the same way about them. It’s worth remembering that at funerals when you’re not close family you can feel a bit of an imposter. “Should I really be here among so much private grief?” you wonder. A quick acknowledgement from the lectern is a reassuring thing to hear.

Now you’re wondering what The Hump is. This is the name given by my old - and now sadly deceased - friend Brian Robinson for the nasty part at the beginning of a speech which you always dread and somehow have to get past. Once you’ve over The Hump, you’re cooking with gas. And The Hump itself need not be a problem, Brian (a former actor turned professional speech coach) advised. You just need to acknowledge its existence and tackle it head on by preparing for it and dealing with it rather than ignoring it and hoping it will go away.

My biggest challenge, I decided, would be to find an anecdote which simultaneously grabbed the audience’s attention, set the tone of the eulogy (affectionate, amused, upbeat, funny not sad) and didn’t outstay its welcome.

On these occasions - seriously: try it! - I find that appealing to God makes all the difference. I prayed for His help in delivering a eulogy worthy of my father. And God came up trumps by supplying me with the perfect anecdote.

It went roughly like this.

“The first time I realised my father was different was 52 years ago when I was sent off to board at a prep school only about half a mile from where we are now. All the other eight year olds knew how to kick a football, pass a rugger ball and catch a cricket ball. I could do none of the above because my father had never shown me. But I was the only boy who knew the Latin name for the common European wall lizard.”

The reason it works is because it’s funny (well I think so), it hints at the theme which will be enlarged on in the body of the eulogy, it makes a geographical connection with both the location and the audience, it doesn’t last more than a minute, it’s easy to remember (as deep-seated personal recollections always are) and it ends with a clearly defined punchline.

But you’re still not over The Hump just yet. First you must make the transition from your grabby intro to the speech proper. This isn’t easy because you’ve likely paused to allow the audience to appreciate the punchline of your opening anecdote, giving them a chance to laugh as they’ve probably been gagging to do because funerals can be so tense. So how do you do this?

Well the solution I came up with, more or less on the spot because at this point I was letting nervous energy and divine providence take care of the heavy lifting, was to acknowledge what an awesome privilege but also a terrifying responsibility it was to be the one who has to deliver your father’s eulogy. I then observed how very much my father would have disapproved of my trying to do it without any notes, it being such a huge risk to take at an occasion so important - and surely, I ought at least to have a safety net ready just in case.

“But it’s your fault, Pa,” I said. “You bred us this way!” Which is true. He did. He never stopped trying to give us advice on the courses we should take in life but we never ever listened to him and I think he took pride in our utter obliviousness to his wishes. It was a sign that we were the free spirits that he wanted us to be and hoped we would be.

From that point on it was almost plain sailing. All we needed now was a pay off: something to reward the audience for their patience and give them the sense of a speech satisfyingly concluded; but also, more importantly, something that left you with the feeling: “Yes. This was truly special man we’ve just been celebrating. And we’re all going to miss him greatly.”

I decided to break the “Say what you’re going to say; say it; say what you have just said” rule by introducing a sub theme. This was because I had belatedly realised that I had something else very important I needed to say about my father. It had only occurred to me in the weeks after his death when my head was suddenly awash with memories of him and I was trying to make sense of them, trying to work out who he really was. You think you know your father when he is alive but you don’t because you are too busy taking him for granted. Only when he has gone do you start asking yourself: “Who actually was this person whom I’ve now irretrievably lost?” When he’s alive he’s your dad and this relationship colours everything you think about him. But when he’s gone you find yourself trying to understand the world as it might have been from his perspective instead of from yours.

What stood out for me was what a blinder he had played with the cards he’d been dealt in life. Anyone - well, almost anyone: probably not my father who was never much cop at bridge - can win a hand when they’re holding all the Kings and Aces. But it’s how you play the average hands or the shitty hands that are the truer mark of character. Though my old man was born to a life of relative privilege - it was neither easy nor conventionally successful. He suffered bouts of depression; he was cruelly cut out of his father’s will; his first two marriages ended in divorce; his business ventures failed; he had never wanted the career that was forced on him by his father and would have been much happier, probably, as an academic or some kind of maverick, independent researcher or author. Yet no one in that church would have considered him a failure for one second. Because he wasn’t. On the contrary, he repeatedly turned what could have been disaster into triumph by resolutely focusing on the main prize.

And what was this main prize? Hard to define, exactly, but we all had a sense of it in our hearts because it was why we were all there celebrating the life of a man who in his various ways had meant so much to us. As I wrote in my Spectator tribute - which, rather sweetly, the undertaker Georgia placed in his coffin so he could digest it at leisure - I grew almost weary of being told by people who had met him what delightful company my father was. He was both interesting (RAF Chinese language specialist; racing driver; guppy breeder; reptile and amphibian collector; inveterate traveller; etc) and interested, always curious in other people, always wanting to find out more. That’s why on his gravestone, we shall be inscribing one of his favourite catchphrases: “What else do you know?” His desire for new information was insatiable.

This led naturally to my conclusion. I quoted the epitaph on Sir Christopher Wren’s tomb. A bit of a cliche, but apposite. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Wren’s epitaph referred to his greatest creation, St Paul’s Cathedral. My father’s to the place he occupied in the memories of all those people - perhaps 150, not bad for a 91-year old who’d outlived all his friends - who’d come to the church to see him off.

Goodbye Pa. We’re going to miss you terribly. But you’re going to live on in all sorts of ways that you could never have imagined. This piece, for example. Someone, somewhere is going to find it useful or comforting or even inspirational. And it’s you they should thank for that, not me.