Last week, discussing famous people I’d met, I baffled my audience when I mentioned Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru, as the most notable.
Admittedly he didn’t have much to say, having been dead over three hundred years, so it was a rather one-sided discussion, which even were he alive he wouldn’t have understood as he couldn’t speak English. Nevertheless, I gave him a good bollocking.
That encounter was half a century back in a Lima cathedral where he lay embalmed in a glass box. He’s not there now, one would hope on the grounds of Latin Catholicism finally acquiring some taste, but on that count I’m not holding my breath.