So, did everyone have a pleasant Christmas? All gorged on food and satisfied with their lot?

I have to say, I ate like a fat bastard and am pleasantly content with my haul. But that’s not what this is about.

I spent my Christmas morning not, as intended, in bed. Instead I traveled with some family to a cold and misty graveyard in Tyrone for a funeral. Whereupon I chanced to be standing before a large gravestone belonging to a largish family.

The father of the group had died in 1890-something, aged 104.

His wife, thirty years his junior, had died twenty years previous.

Their eldest child, forty five years his junior, had died in 1911.

What do you take from those figures?

Some 44 year old got a 14 year old knocked up, and didn’t get beaten to death for his trouble, but got to live another sixty years.

Very, very different from what’d happen today, methinks…