When the Covid 19 pandemic struck and we went into the first lockdown at the end of March 2020, I was listening to a discussion on the radio about how people were going to occupy their time. Someone suggested we might want to write a memoir, mainly for our children and grandchildren, which sounded like a nice idea to me, if only I could remember enough reasonably interesting episodes of my life to make it worthwhile. After all I never had the foresight or dedication to keep a diary.

“What the hell,” I thought, with my usual delusions of adequacy, “I’ll give it a shot.”

My stay on this planet has largely consisted of three major components: family, music and business. So, hardly surprising then, that when I sat down to write, they proved to be the dominant factors.