Firstly: Your father is a war hero - who endured terrible trauma. I have deep respect for him - and your mother.

You [00:10:47]: He (Eric Farrar) was part of the British Expeditionary Force that went to fight in Europe in 1939 and was captured just outside Dunkirk in the spring of 1940 and was a prisoner of war in a German prison camp until the end of the war in 1945. And he came back to Britain then, hadn't been able to go to university. And he was given a lift (to a) debriefing because I think he’d escaped from prisoner of war camp or something.

It’s a little surprising you’re not sure about whether he’d escaped or not - but it’s normal that people don’t like to talk about trauma - so maybe he never really discussed it with you.

[00:11:16]: And my mother had been a driver during the war. She had driven these huge American people, carriers (sic) (from the transcript of the podcast - listening to it later, i realized she was driving 'huge American people-carriers' not 'huge American people') from the ports in Scotland down to the south coast in 1943 and 1944, preparing for the invasion of Europe and VE Day. She was driving my father for some debriefing. He was an enlisted soldier. He wasn't an officer, but he had some information about the prisoner of war camps in Germany. (Which is how they met.)

Although officers were not required to work, he was an enlisted soldier, so that means five years hard labour in the camp on low food rations - with the constant threat of punishment or even execution. That will break a man down. If he did escape and was then recaptured, they would have made life doubly-hard. That’s a lot of trauma - which of course comes fully-franked with PTSD for life.

After the war, Eric and your mother began the next stage of their lives as “itinerants … travelling around the world for many, many years.”

Now PTSD would explain that, or even a natural high dose of wanderlust, though with a family of six children, it’s a big deal to relocate so many times.

Also the countries that he chose - Singapore, Yemen, Egypt, Cyprus, Libya - it does seem plausible he was working as an intelligence gathering agent for the British military - and went wherever he was deployed.

Of course, i don’t know for sure - only wondering how he managed to send his kids, or you at least, to a very posh school in England, Churcher’s College?Hard to see how you'd be able to afford that on a humble English teacher’s wage.

I’m also still curious as to how the heck you got into University College London - and then Oxford? Don’t quite buy that door-knocking story and the chance meeting with Robin Forrest. You did mention that ‘people had been written to’. If your father, or another relative(?) had some clout in the UK intelligence world, then maybe that was enough to do the trick?

Finally there’s your affinity with the ‘deep-state’ movers and shakers. For someone who was born and raised in a world of international intelligence gathering, a closed-circle power cohort with a globalized agenda would seem normal.

At the end of the day, it’s interesting, but not important. You definitely made your own mark, regardless of your upbringing. The consequences of your actions are yours to own - not your father’s.