The medical consultant of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library told Don Chapman to strip off, took one look at him and demanded: ‘Young man, how do you expect to get through life with a body like that?’ Seventy years later he is still trying.

In this, his latest book, a tongue-in-cheek memoir called ‘A Tenpenny Dip in Paradise and other flights of fancy’, Don draws on some of the wackier articles he wrote during forty years in journalism to explore the excitements, fascinations and absurdities of the twentieth century and dip a wary toe into the turbulent waters of the twenty-first.