What will the future offer you our newest grandaughter? It is so important to be optimistic. We want the best for you, health, happiness, a future, a career, a loving relationship and to grow old without want or fear.
Not everyone can take these things for granted. Certainly not in poorer parts of the world. certainly not in places where nature turns against people and where life is a struggle against the environment.
But for you a child born into a rich, western democracy it should be possible to look forward positively to a future free from what a saintly man called William Beveridge once described as the great evils: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease.
Thank God that in the main these evils have been conquered and that you will be able to take for granted, clean water, sanitation, an education, good health care, a job at the end of school and college, a career, and a comfortable old age.
But there is so much more to being human. It is true that ensuring that life is comfortable is necessary, but it is only a first step.
What I hope for you and all my grandchildren is a future where you can dream your dreams and celebrate your achievements and live surrounded by music, culture, art and poetry inspiring the marvellous creative spirit that inspires and shapes you as a human being.
It is true that the world we are gifting you is both better and worse than the one we inherited. There is much for grandparents to be proud of and in particular I believe that life is now so much freer and more hopeful as a result of the many changes that happened in one decade, now called 'the sixties'.
Before 1961 we used to watch life in Black and White, Dixon of Dock Green was really Dixon of Dock Grey, now we watch TV and the wider world in colour. Before 1961 we used to get new clothes for the Whitsun walks now we can change our look whenever we choose. Before 1961 children could be 'seen but not heard' now your voice and opinions are sought and valued. In the grey days of the 1950's the watch word was austerity but life now offers so much more and can be embraced and enjoyed to the fullest, if you can imagine it, you can achieve it.
But then there is global warming of course, the weather is worse, wetter and windier, or do I just remember the long summers of my school days as being warmer and sunnier? There is still poverty, the five evils still stalk the land both here in the western world, and across the globe and people continue to battle against them, in Asia and Africa and the Middle East. War continues to rear its ugly head most recently in a place called Iraq and it continues in Afghanistan, these are places I suspect that ten years from now you will still be learning about in school and seeing on the TV news. Terrorism threatens the stability of the world we are bequeathing to you and tragically religion continues to be the cause of the worst expressions of terrorism. How God's children can hate each other so? is a question I cannot answer but perhaps one day you and all those other children born this year will find a better answer than we have.
You will become in time a new generation and it is my hope for you that you will find ways to restore compassion to the centre of human life and ensure that young people and women are more respected than they are now.
So things are better, you can be more optimistic than when I was born in the shadow of a war that had ravaged Europe and into a world where opportunities were limited for people born into what was called the 'working class'.
I was lucky, I managed to get myself into college and I have worked in a job that it has been a privilege and now in retirement I am relatively well off. So it is my hope and prayer for you and all my grandchildren that you go on to live a happy fulfilling and rewarding life and that where possible you take responsibility for making the world a better place than the one you have inherited from me and my generation. I can only say in our defence that we tried .................
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