Bumped into His Imperial Looniness the other evening hunched at a canteen table and shovelling some sort of kidney bean concoction into his maw while staring and blinking at various pages of the Financial Times. I'd thought for a while that we might meet and had settled to the view that the best course was to go up, say hello and try to put past enmity behind us. He was well and very charming, though still with flashes of the old hatreds when names from our mutual past popped into the conversation. He tells me he is quite a painter after attending courses at the City Lit as part of his recuperation. Genuinely hope he will be all right: he had a horrible time, not least because people were horrible to him - and I am ashamed to say I was one.
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Another old penny came in the form of an email from Gaffer regarding the wayzgoose (how about that for a word?) to be held at the usual place in Limehouse in the second week of next month. More applicants that spaces and I am delighted to be going, although hope not to pick up the lurgy that was doing the rounds there last year and which laid me low for a fortnight. Gaff promises to recite the doggerel he wrote as a lad in Mansfield and which will surely be his epitaph. Indeed, such a declamatory feat after too much food and drink might carry him off. What a fitting end that would be. The whole scene is suitable for a short television drama or a Man Booker Prizewinning novella on manners, reminiscence and poor behaviour. One guages the time by occasionally glancing out to the river, seeing the light die at four o'clock, the water sliding by (if the tide is up), wondering what happens in the offices and flats over on the south bank. Always a beautiful, lost day.
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Finally, coffees with My Cousin The Chartered Accountant, not seen for a couple of years, and who is expecting her first baby aged 38. We giggled and gossiped, decided that Uncle Roderick would outlive us all and that Auntie Gerry - she's been 54 these past 10 years, you know - is cracking up, though since she lives in America there's not much to be done about it. More coffees, please.
