The world we have lost.

Please watch this fascinating film clip of British children in 1901. How much character each has. How many of them died in the Great War?

As my friend the late Hugo Lindsay said, no sentient being thinks things were on the whole better in the Edwardian era than now, but how much we have lost.

This intense longing for our lost home, the definition of nostalgia, is why I am a conservative. Nothing to do with economics or enthusiasm for Nato.

To quote another dead friend, the poetess (the word she preferred) Eva Weggelaar who died in her twenties: 'I want to go back to the real world but it no longer exists'.