CAN it really be 60 years ago today since they laid King George VI to rest? It doesn't seem almost a lifetime since, on 15 February 1952, in Gerard Street, us pupils of Becket School assembled to observe the two minutes' silence that had fallen over the United Kingdom and throughout the Commonwealth. Come to think of it, we believed we still had an empire then.

Memories of that time are still vivid: sitting cross-legged on a canteen floor when the BBC interrupted a schools wireless broadcast. John Snagge, more at home commentating on the Boat Race, began gravely: "This is London. It is with the greatest sorrow that we make the following announcement ... "

When he'd finished, our teacher, Mrs Alright, said, also in a grave voice, "Wait here. I must inform the headmaster."

When I got home, I informed my mother, who didn't seem especially interested.

She was one of the few people I knew who disliked the Queen Mother.

It went back to the Blitz when Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who told some of my mother's bombed-out Hull neighbours: "My house has been bombed too." True, Buckingham Palace had caught a stray German bomb, but my mother thought that the King's wife patronised people who'd lost everything. "She had another six castles," she muttered every time she retold the story, which was often. Just like I'm doing now.

For lunch on that day 60 years ago I had a jacket potato, cooked in the red-hot ashes of our coal fire.

Only we didn't call it lunch. We called it dinner. Breakfast, dinner, tea and supper – I don't think I had lunch until I was married.

It was windy that day and I got something in my eye, so after lunch, sorry, dinner, my mother marched me down to Mr Davies, the chemist in Abbey Street, and he removed whatever it was.

It's funny what you recall from decades ago. Yet I can't remember what I had for dinner, sorry, lunch, yesterday.

Anyway, while the King lay in state in Westminster Hall, I was leaning over our wireless, listening to the velvet-voiced Richard Dimbleby: "Never better, safer guarded, lay a sleeping king than this." I've often wondered if he'd written that down earlier, or if it just came to him there and then.

Talking of anniversaries, it's 70 years today since the fall of Singapore.

It was also the day our family lost touch with Cousin Fred.

I've told you about Fred. He was a rubber planter, serving in the militia when the Japanese came calling. He ended up in Changi prison for four years. He was unlucky, was Fred.

In the First World War, the Kaiser had captured him. Well, not the Kaiser himself, obviously. But he still spent four years in a German POW camp near Berlin.

Fred was a cavalryman in 1914, so I feel I should make an effort to see War Horse. However, when I consulted fellow columnist Neil White's Every Film in 2012 blog, I found he and his wife divided. She thinks the story far-fetched.

But look, if a cruise liner captain can fall off his sinking ship straight into a lifeboat, then anything is possible.

I might give it a go.