I’m sixty five. As a boy I knew some extremely old people who occasionally reminisced about old people they had known when they were themselves young. It’s surprising how far back one can go with eyewitness testimony on that basis. For example my grandmother (b 1883) saw the Diamond Jubilee procession of 1897 and told me about it often enough for it still to seem like a recent event to me now. More curious, Lawrie Tanner (b. 1890) lived in Westminster School where his father was a housemaster. As a boy he knew an old man who remembered shooting snipe on what is now Vincent Square. That takes one back to about 1840, say 185 years. Now there’s a point to this and it concerns the memory of the early Church. Irenaeus, writing in about the year 180, wrote that as a boy he had known Polycarp, who knew the Apostle John personally.