I'm 39 years old; next year I will turn 40.
I don't quite know how that happened, as I still feel like a big kid who's really only just left home, and moved out into the big wide world to seek his fortune. The years have whizzed by in a heartbeat. It's a cliche, but it's true.
But what blows my mind even more, thinking about it, is if you go back to the year of my birth, 1979, and then go back before that "another me" (eg: 39 years), this country was in the middle of World War II. When I was young, and was taught about the World Wars etc, they always seemed this far-off and distant event from history, and I genuinely grew up believing such things could never happen again.
Today we commemorate 100 years since the Battle of Amiens in World War I. And the truth is, it's not so long ago: it's not some distant event from another time. And the events of World War II, even less so. My own mum was born in 1939, the year it started, and my grandfather, William McNamara, was a doctor in the Armed Forces.
Which is why (surplus to the added dimension of Britain being cast back economically to Victorian Times), for any student of history, Brexit is such an utter tragedy. We are quite literally in the process of dismantling the organisations/treaties and bonds specifically set up to prevent such horrors taking place, ever, ever again.
To deny that the European Union itself was the lynch-pin in that, or to glibly assume that countries in Europe could and never would return to hostilities, is ignorance and naivety off the scale. And simply put, there is nothing in this world that was worth risking that, not for our children's futures.
NOTHING.
#CentenaryBattleOfAmiens
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