I’m not certain that I have a ‘favourite’ historical figure – there are quite a few people I would like to have met. It would have been interesting to meet the young Mary, the mother of Jesus. How would she have felt being pregnant and unmarried? Did she realise that she had been chosen to give birth to someone who would have followers for over 2000 years? Or was she just a young woman who got pregnant and a whole religion was somehow built around her fatherless baby?

It would, of course, be interesting to meet her son at some point to find out if he was as ‘good’ as the men who wrote about his life made out. Did he really bring alive a man who had been dead, walk on water and turn a flagon of water into wine?

Today I read about a young Cherokee who had lived among the settlers in America. He was fascinated by the fact that a man could make marks on a paper and the marks could tell someone else what the man wanted to tell him. He knew that the native Americans did not have a way of writing down their words so figured out a list of 85 symbols which stood for the syllables of the Cherokee language. At first the elders thought he was performing some sort of witchcraft but he was able to show them that the marks he made could be understood by others when he wrote a message to his daughter and she was able to tell them what it said. I think he would have been a very interesting man to have known.

Leonardo da Vinci, Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Cleopatra, Helen Keller, Theodore Roosevelt, JFK, Abe Lincoln, Paul Revere, Prince, – I could carry on writing down names of favourites and finding good reasons to speak to them, but I will have left out just as many because I can’t think of all the interesting people that I have learned about. (And, if it could be just one, I’ll go for Prince!)