"You Can't Have Your Cake and Eat it Too!"

So - oh so memorably - once said one who could have become my stepdad, the beloved and wonderful Richard Welch. Brought up in wartime, bombed-out London, he was like a father to me and my younger sister after our Dad walked out on our Mum (some 44-45-odd years ago now). And to describe myself as deeply grief-stricken scarcely does justice to my reaction when, while on a three-year sojourn to my parents' own United States of America, I received, in Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota, the shocking news of his untimely death in 1994 at the relatively youthful age of 67 or 68 (apparently while campervanning on our picturesque South Island West Coast, not long after an energetic campaign to help promote the then prospective option of a new MMP voting system in a nationwide referendum).

But I needs keep this succinct for now: it's simply to commemorate - in northern hemispheric time, corresponding to Richard's birthplace - his 'birth-anniversary', as he always liked to style it, 92 years ago (on September the 24th); he, like my Dad, shared the same birth year as the Queen. Sadly I've even now - mere hours ago - missed the corresponding NH time/day of the 24th, but so be it...

Richard also came into mind yesterday after I heard word of some new survey/study revealing that women - including moreover staunch as feminists - actually prefer fellas (i.e. as prospective romantic partners) who, though sometimes perhaps misconceived as somewhat patronizing in their treatment of (what some referred to once as) 'the fairer sex', nevertheless still maintain(ed) the old-fashioned courtesies once classed as chivalry; (arguably still implicitly respected by most people).

Though I fain see myself as among this number (and I believe I've good grounds for so doing), rarely would one encounter one as purely chivalrous - in all the purest and noblest and even childlike senses of the term - as Richard Welch...

...a rare specimen of humanity indeed, whose 'kind' sadly is distinctly on the wane, even arguably rapidly on the road to extinction. But thankfully not where it really matters.