One for Charlie

Charlie was born during the First World War, had meningitis at 18 months, lost his mother at three, played marbles in the London streets around Holborn when you had to scramble out of the way of horses and carts, cleared barbed wire from the Normandy beaches on D Day, and worked as postman for a small publishing company that gave me my first job in 1972 when he, by rights, should have been retiring. Charlie worked on until he was 83.

Today, along with his family and some friends, I said a final farewell to this lovely man.