OPINION:
I have a question for you. Is it prophecy to predict an event that happened 60 years ago but that you had no way of knowing about? If so I have the gift of prophecy. And the giver of this gift, and just in time for Christmas, was a reader whom I shall not name because I have not asked his permission but to whom I shall be forever grateful. He made me grin from ear to somewhere over there.
As retentive readers will recall I wrote last week about William Shakespeare, the 81-year-old Englishman who was the second person in the United Kingdom to receive the Covid vaccine. In the column I wondered whether his parents had christened him William in the hope of engendering amusing conversations with people in authority, and I went on to invent a hypothetical conversation between Mr Shakespeare and a traffic cop. And that was where I left it.
But within hours of the column being published I got an email. Such a conversation had indeed taken place, said the email, and it had been all but word for word identical to the one I had transcribed. And the evidence my correspondent had for saying so was the testimony of none other than William Shakespeare's son himself.
(The 16th century Shakespeare also had a son, named Hamnet, who died in 1596 at the age of 11, possibly of bubonic plague. Scholars have speculated that Hamlet, written several years later, was at least in part informed by Hamnet's death, but scholars have speculated on many things concerning Shakespeare, and often to no account.)