Rhodes on a dry month, a surprise price rise and a tribute to the wartime generation

Welcome to February fill dyke, the name once given to the second month of the year because that was when rain and melting snow filled the ditches with water. In these climate-change days, the BBC's long-range forecast indicates no serious rain between now and the middle of the month. February dry dyke.

Or, in my case, February fill-the-insurer's-pockets. Remember all those honeyed words from the car-insurance industry promising that we loyal customers would no longer be rooked at every renewal but would pay no more than the premium for a new customer? My renewal has just arrived and it's going up by 14.4 per cent. Toads.

Thirty years ago today, my father died of cancer. He was 66. Born into a big Bradford family, his life fell apart when his father walked out and the kids were split up and sent to orphanages. In 1939 he was evacuated to a Yorkshire village where he trained as plumber. On regular trips to London he worked as a waiter in the Cafe Royal during the Blitz. He met the girl he would marry, served in the Home Guard and was conscripted into the coal mines as a Bevin Boy. And all this before he was 20.

The point is, this was not an unusual life story for that generation. Their hopes, dreams and plans were torn apart by the Depression of the 1930s and the world war that followed. If they had one unifying ambition when peace came, it was that their kids would have a better life. Which explains why my baby-boom generation, born from the 1940s to the 1960s, had it so blessedly easy: free health care, free education, free milk, free university places, decent pensions, and home ownership not just for the wealthy but as the norm.

It irritates me so much when I hear my fellow babyboomers, banging on about what a hard time they had and how today's young families should stand on their own two feet, just like we had to.

But the truth is, we didn't. We stood on the shoulders of men like my dad who, at the age when we and our kids were off to college or working in clean, warm offices, was 300 yards deep in Barnsley Main colliery, scraping coal into buckets and dreaming of sunlit uplands.