What a success you were, Cousin Martin!

through, I suddenly felt plunged into my distant past and my myriad early childhood memories.

My Great Uncle Len was his Grandpa Len. Hilary Amis was Len and his wife Margery’s youngest child.

We must have both run around the beautiful Abbey Timbers, in the then very rural Oxfordshire – the large, timber-framed thatched house that Len and Margery had bought some years earlier.

We almost certainly enjoyed the same wonderful country lanes, pig farms, dairy farms and fruit orchards surrounding their home and were entertained by Len’s accordion-playing on the lovely lawn in their country garden. Halcyon memories, at least for me.

Every summer, the boys in the extended family spent time in Swansea with Martin and his siblings and his parents, Hilary and Kingsley.

The girls went to stay with Hilary’s sister Margaret and her children near Cheltenham –so I never met up with Martin. My brothers did.

It suddenly seems a shame that we will now never be able to meet up and share such special memories of people and places.

By Alison Tomlin, Reigate, Surrey, who receives £50

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Thrill of the human touch

Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence (AI)?

It seems that everyone is, and sometimes with reason – even its inventors have been panic-stricken about the robots’ threats to humanity.

It’s predicted that AI will wipe out jobs by the tens of thousands, from accountancy to the waiters’ and waitresses’ trade. In Korea, you may now be served at table by a robot – which children love. Journalism too will come under pressure from the AI takeover: I have been told by an editorial pal that a robot may be instructed to ‘write a column in the style of Mary Kenny’. I take this as a compliment.

Robots dominating our civilisation doesn’t seem an inviting prospect. Even Alexa, Amazon’s disembodied voice box that answers questions, encouraging mental laziness, seems sinister.

And yet there’s one welcome aspect of the robot revolution: it may make us appreciate human beings more.

We are familiar with the scenario of waiting on a telephone ‘helpline’ for half an hour – hoping to talk to someone at, say, a bank or a water company – and all we get is a repeated voicemail with some twaddle such as ‘Please hold on – we value your custom’.

And then – wonderful! – a human being at last becomes available. How delightful it suddenly is to be in contact with a real person!

AI may well turn out like that. We’ll use the machines for much of the boring, routine stuff – one hopes for the invention of a robot that performs housework. But we’ll treasure real human beings for the tasks only a human can do – a kindly nurse to hold your hand when you’re having eye surgery; a jolly solicitor who explains the intricacies of inheritance tax.

Human contact will be doubly appreciated – because robots will show that the human touch is irreplaceable.

The ersatz replacement always increases the value of the real thing.

I was amused to hear from an Irish farming woman that AI once signalled Artificial Insemination – when sperm was taken from the bull, to be served to the heifer. There was the popular AI man who toured the countryside pursuing his vocation cheerfully – a career unknown to us townies.

Thus do alphabetical abbreviations come to change their significance.

Polly Toynbee, the grande dame of radical chic, will grace the delightful and varied Deal Music and Arts Festival in July, to be interviewed (about her memoir of her posh radical family) by Gavin Esler. The discourse might be fizzier if I conducted the conversation.

I was the first journalist to interview La Toynbee, back in 1967 – for the London Evening Standard – when, aged 20, this granddaughter of the great Arnold Toynbee was regarded as the coming thing. I wrote rather a smart-aleck piece, which greatly displeased young Polly.

I had been sent to meet all kinds of celebrities, from Lord Attlee to Tom Wolfe, but none had reprimanded me for what I had penned. I was impressed by her confidence – which I suppose comes from the family social inheritance she uneasily now writes about in the aptly named An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals

Our world views have remained very different, but old age is a mellowing process, and the lady has earned her spurs.

And I do admire one consistent aspect of Polly’s career: she has always cared about the poor, and even taken a succession of humble serving jobs to see life from the vantage point of the disadvantaged.

I shall pay my £10 to hear her speak in Deal.

The Irish government is planning to introduce compulsory warning labels on beers, spirits, liqueurs and wine to alert imbibers that alcohol causes liver damage, cancer and death. The warnings will be issued bilingually – in Irish and English – and will also be pasted outside any premises, such as pubs, restaurants, theatres and hotels, that trade in alcohol.

Ireland is the first country in the EU to embark on this endeavour, and the EU is very cross about it: the Continent is wineand beer-producing. By the way, some of these wine-drinkers are exceptionally healthy and long-lived – Sardinians and Greeks are among the world’s fittest oldies.

As Ireland becomes more secular, it also becomes more moralistic and the authorities more finger-wagging about human frailties.

My cousins in France have invented a charming family summer festival, which they have named a cousinade. This consists in inviting a group of one’s cousins to spend the day – possibly the weekend – getting together.

It’s rather regrettable that the main occasion for meeting up with a variety of family connections is often, for our vintage, a funeral. So it’s nice to introduce a new tradition of bringing interlinking kin together – especially since extended families are now so spread out, geographically.

The cousinade went off successfully, and a happy precedent was established.