Is Keith Richards our GLE?

You might not think of the Wrinkled One first on your shortlist of Greatest Living Englishmen. What about David Attenborough, you might say, or Tim Berners-Lee? I might have said the same thing, until last night when I began to watch BBC 4's bold and highly courageous donation of a huge tract of their airtime to El Ricardo to talk about his life and work. Keith was born in 1943, making him eight years older than me. He was born in hospital, which was fortunate because when the family returned home they found it had been flattened by a German bomb.

His childhood was spent playing in bomb-sites (so was mine; many were still there by the mid 50s) and waiting for the ration on sweets to be lifted (it was the last commodity to be rationed, and when it was lifted, in 1955, it constituted one of my first memories) Being smaller than his contemporaries, he was bullied at school until one day the red mist descended and he lashed out at one. From that day on he became the defender of other bullied children. All this I can to some extent identify with. What I can't is his early infatuation with the guitar and playing the blues on it. But as we know, the rest is history, and the most extraordinary history at that. When we finally gave up and went to bed last night, he was talking about making friends with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, their initial success and resultant fame and how poor Brian couldn't cope with that.

I am looking forward to watching the next instalment of The Keith's Progress with enormous anticipation. You could do worse than join me...