HENRY ALLINGHAM R.I.P.

Since I so often commemorate the passing of interesting artists on this blog, I should like to mark the passing of Henry Allingham, who died on Saturday morning. I don't feel able to recommend any particular obituary but if you have a moment I recommend you read about him somewhere. A remarkable man, who lived on more than 80 years after the end of the 1st World War - and for almost all of those, preferring to remain silent about the horrors that haunted his memory and gave him, as if he hadn't suffered enough, the additional ineradicable guilt so many survivors feel when they witnessed the daily slaughter of those all around them, day in and day out, in the most atrocious conditions and for so little point.

And yet Henry Allingham did survive, and did so, he suggested, by not worrying in later life. And by coincidence I heard a doctor of some kind say on the radio (BBC Radio 6 Music) only about ten days ago that people who live to be 80 or even 90 are of widely varying personality types, that those who live to be 100 are less dissimilar and that those few who live to be 110 are almost identical in fundamental personality - that is, they are not worriers: they cope well with stress.