Something was happening and we didn't know what it was — did we, Mr Jones? But it was something astonishing — something we've never seen before or since. Let me explain.
Once upon a time, I was a timid schoolboy at a boarding school tucked away in the depths of the Somerset countryside. I don't know what my parents paid for my education, but the school certainly didn't spend it on food. Late one night, my hunger unrelieved by a meal of sardines on toast, I crept back into the kitchens. There in a back corridor where no boy was allowed to go, I found a nuclear air raid alarm, linked through to the local civil defence network. To this day, I have never seen anything that terrified me more.
And a few days later the Cuban missile crisis hit the headlines. I was certain I was going to die. And at exactly that time the school chaplain played a track from Bob Dylan's second album …