As everyone must know by now, The Times celebrated its bicentenary in 1985. It certainly came as a shock to me to realize that I have been writing the ‘Moreover…’ column for two hundred years, but time flies when you are having fun.
Having lived through the Napoleonic era, the spread of railways, the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde, the collapse of the Edward VIII coronation mug industry, the Falklands War and a new Napoleonic era under Mrs Thatcher, I am sometimes asked to what I owe my longevity. Quite simple. I have ignored public affairs and events of any kind. To be conscious of the milestones of history is to be conscious of the passing of time and quite honestly, casting my mind back over the last two hundred years, I cannot remember anything important happening at all.
To take a small example, there was a sinister rumour at The Times early in 1985 that the building was to be visited by the Royal Family. I promptly closed the door of my tiny office tight and put a DO NOT DISTURB notice outside, as there is nothing that interrupts a train of thought more than getting up and curtseying the whole time.
That afternoon I looked up from my typewriter and realized I was being watched from the doorway by a man. I stared at him hard, but he would not go away.
‘And what do you do?’ he said suddenly.
‘I make the occasional joke and try and get it in the papers,’ I said. ‘What do you do?’
‘Pretty much the same thing,’ he said.
‘I stare into space a lot.’
‘I know the feeling well,’ said the man. ‘Maybe we should change places.’
It was only later I realized that it was the Duke of Edinburgh. But the man is a good sport, and later in the year we duly swapped places for a fortnight. Some of his pieces are in this book, and I wonder if you can spot which ones they are.
Meanwhile, I am looking forward to the next two hundred years of ‘Moreover…Whatever momentous and earth-shattering things happen in those two centuries, be assured that Moreover will be there to ignore them, day by day.
Introduction, Moreover,Too 1985
