So what is history going to say about you? What do you feel in your heart of hearts is going to be your epitaph after you’ve gone? And I don’t mean what is engraved on your tombstone but written in some great cosmic record of the universe. Personally, I don’t think I’ll even warrant a footnote. But if I do, I would like history to record that I had a go, made an effort, tried my best to make a difference. That I stood up for what I believed in, stood up to get counted and stood up for my rights. I would like history to say, maybe, that I got up off my backside and just stood up – it would be enough.

And you, my friend, what would you like? What do you think history will say? What would you like history to say? Is there a gap between these two? Can you bridge it? What do you have to do to make that gap connect? Think about both what it would say about you as a person, and about your deeds.

We have to care, if we want to be successful, that those who come after are going to inherit a better world than the one we found ourselves in. You remember all those books on self--sufficiency that were all the rage back in the 1970s?^* Well, a key thing they all seemed to have in common was they said if you had land, you had to make better use of it than the person who had it before you. You had to improve it. Same with this world. We have to consciously make the effort to improve it before we go. We have to take responsibility for what we’ve been given and make a better use of it before we shuffle off and pass it on.

How will we point at the polluted oceans, the dried-up rivers, the melted ice caps and say to our metaphorical children, ‘One day all this will be yours – oh and sorry about what we did with it’? I think they may be a little angry at us. History may indeed write us off as termite people. We have destroyed and polluted and slaughtered and made a pretty poor show of things. Individually we can make a difference. We must make a difference. Individually history must hold us accountable.

The trouble is there are so many people who won’t change because they think they won’t be held accountable. If there is no one watching, they think they can get away with murder. History will make short work of them.