During the Christmas period I had the enjoyable experience of watching on to HMS Pinafore, always my favourite of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, possibly because it has a heroine called Josephine and so did I until her death.

In other works Gilbert makes fun of police, politicians, the law, the stage and poets of the Oscar Wilde school, and in Pinafore it is the turn of the Royal Navy and how democratisation might help or hinder with side-swipes at Sir Joseph Porter KCB who puts forward the view that love can level all ranks - so long as it suits his book.

I can’t enjoy music so much as I used to because of my deafness - one of the unavoidable effects of living longer than humans have evolved for, but enough of Sullivan’s music gets through to me still to cheer me up, and the dancing, lights and Gilbertian logic still tickles the funny bone - subtitles help of course.

(Incidentally, don’t you feel sorry for the unfortunate whose job it is to put a newsreader’s spoken words into text? I get the impression two people are doing it, the second correcting the first’s errors)

That Pinafore was great but not earth-shattering.

On another occasion, Josie and I and millions of others simultaneously were awe-struck by theatrical performances and another was witnessed by only a hundred or two.

The most recent of these events happened on June 30, 1994, and many of you have got it already.

In a ten-minute interval in the Eurovision song contest hosted by Ireland, a large troupe of Irish dancers gave the performance of their lives and in offices and pubs all over the world the conversation was about Riverdance, not the contest.

The other big event took place on February 14, 1984 - how many clues do you need? Sarajevo, Ravel’s Bolero? Torvill and Dean?

For the smaller occasion, I may be the last surviving witness.

In about 1946 I was taken to the Hippodrome in Stockton to see my first Savoy opera, The Pirates of Penzance, the first such after the war, and heard enthusiastic amateurs giving their all for the first time in six years.

I knew much of the music as my parents had been members of a similar group, but seeing it with the lights full on inside and out was a new experience for me.

Thank you all, the world-wide G and S fraternity!