I realised that this joke was an in-joke and my audience was .. well… out. you might think there was only one expletive left in the universe and it began with “f” and ended with “k”. Oddly enough those watching on Zoom seemed to get the joke. I managed to make some mileage out of my failure to amuse and the rest of the speech frolicked apace. The word volunteer comes from the French “voluntaire”, which is a 17th-century word for an unpaid soldier who signed up out of poverty or patriotism.