Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Proustian reflection. Talk of premium bonds took me back to my own childhood when televisions were powered by flickering gaslight and the world was made of wood. My mum kept her sixty premium bonds in a leather wallet. That’s £60 worth of premium bonds, by the way, for the idea of acquiring a bond with a higher denomination face value of say, £5, was a mere fantasy and not for the likes of us.

In those far off days of grey Stalinist style socialism, you lent the government the money, you were put into a prize draw and at any time you could get your money back. Not like nowadays, when you buy a lottery ticket at 3pm on a Saturday and the inevitably losing ticket is sent bucketwards at 8.01pm along with the first draft of that letter to your boss describing in graphic, and indeed painful, detail just precisely what he or she can do with their job. But that’s progress.

As is a new service to JT readers I’ve just thought up.

It occurs to me that the august readership of this esteemed organ have better things to do with their collective time than check to see if they are in receipt of a winning premium bond, perhaps inherited from an obligingly dead aunt or whatever. So here’s what to do. Dig out your collection of bonds but don’t bother checking to see if any are winners. Instead, send the bonds off to me and I’ll check them and, if you’re a winner, I’ll let you know. Now, I’ve only just come up with this idea so bear with me as there are a few details still to be worked out.

For example, the legal department at The JT are working on a document for readers to sign called Power of Executor. It's all legal mumbo jumbo of course so my advice to you, dear readers, is just to sign it and don’t bother reading the usual small, or in the present case, invisible, print. And of course there’s the issue of finding a country that doesn’t have one of those tiresome extradition treaties with the UK.