Deeply honoured by the gesture of this dinner which manages to link my depature from Belgium with P.G. Wodehouse and the Battle of Britain.

Over four years in Belgium have been immensely enjoyable and rewarding, not least due to the sheer variery of my activities, over and above the conventional role of Ambassador. Let me list some of my positions :

• Member of Administrative Counsel, College of Europe, Bruges
• Member of Honorary Board of Directors, United Fund for Belgium
• Trustee, European Business Management School, Antwerp
• President, The British Charitable Fund
• Honorary President, British Chamber of Commerce in Belgium
• Patron, British School of Brussels
• Chevalier, Confrerie des Chevalier de la Tour, Tournai
• Official member of the Commonwealth/Belgian Joint Comittee of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission
• Last, but not least, patron, Drones Club of Belgium

You rightly identified my interest in military history. This almost certainly has its origins in a military childhood. My father was a soldier who landed in Normandy on 6 june 1944 and spent the uncomfortable winter of 1944-45 near here on the river Maas. He liked this Belgium and Holland. My younger brother was christened Bavon - no one knew why until we discovered that news of this birth arrived when my father was visiting Saint Baaf's Cathedral in Gent in 1946.

From 1946-54, during the formative age from 5-13, we lived in occupied Germany, beginning at a village also very close to here, not far from Aachen. So playing in the burnt out wrecks of tanks, crashed airplanes atc. Are amongst my earliest memories. So how does this relate to this evening's other two themes, P.G. Wodehouse and the Battle of Britain ?

Not at all, on the face of it.

Unveiling the plaque to P.G. Wodehouse's imprisonment in the Fortress of Huy some weeks ago, I remarked on how unwordly his reaction to the Nazi invasion was. He dismissed his own internment as "silly horseplay". He made fun of the Germans fears that he might steal the plans of the fort - and sell them to an enemy. This attitude landed him in hot water with the British authorities, particularly after his rather flippant radio broadcasts from Hitler's Berlin.

Yet it is not hard to see in the dare-devil heroism of the handful of fighter pilots who won the Battle of Britain in 1940, an echo of the spirit and values of P.G.'s Edwardian England, and the Bertie Woosterish character that inhabit it.

Take for example, the defiance which shines through the grim humour of the poem "The Dying Airman" :

A handsome young airman lay dying,

And as on the aerodrome the lay,

To the mechanics who round him came sighing,

These last dying words he did say :

'Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,

The connecting-rod out of my brain,

Take the cam-shaft from out of my backbone,

And assemble the engine again.'

This poem is attributed to Anon but could have been written by P.G. Wodehouse himself.

A similar spirit infuses Richard Hillary's famous book "The Last Enemy", of the confusion of feelings which those aviators in 1940 experienced :

"The pilot is of a race of men who since time immemorial have been inarticulate; who, through their daily contact with death, have realised, often enough unconsciously, certain fundamental things.

It is only in the air that the pilot can grasp that feeling, that flash of knowledge, of insight, that matures hum beyond his years; only in the air that he knows suddenly that he is a man in a world of men.

'Coming back to earth' has for him a double significance.

He finds it difficult to orientate himself in a world that is so wordly, amongst a people whose conversation seems to him briljant, minds agile and knowledge complete - yet a people somehow blind."

Even more metaphysical is the poem by Yeats, "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death". This articulates something of the sense of mastery, of escape and of fatal indifference that airmen commonly experienced during the Battle of Britain :

'A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.'

That is rather too serious a note to end on - so let me end with a story about the perils of being married to a tough lady and of not having a Jeeves for protection.

I had a case of whisky in my cellar and my wife told me to empty each and every bottle down the sink, or else … so I reluctantly proceeded with the unhappy task. I drew the cork from the first bottle and poured the contents down the sink, with the exception of one glass, which I drank.

I pulled the cork from the second bottle and did likewise, with the exception of one glass, which I drank. I emptied the third bottle, except for a glass, which I drank and then I took the cork from the fourth sink, poured the glass down the bottle and drank that too.

I pulled the bottle from the next glass, drank one sink out of it, and emptied the rest down the cork. Then I pulled the sink from the next bottle and poured it down the glass and drank the cork, and finally I took the glass from the last bottle, emptied the cork, poured the sink down the rest and drank the pour.

When I had everything emptied, I steadied the house with one hand, counted the bottles and glasses and corks with the other and found there were 29. To make sure, I recounted them when tey came by again and this time there we 74.

As the house came around the next time I counted them again, and finally I had all the houses and sinks and glasses and cork and bottles counted, exept one house, which I then drank.

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