Posting has been light today because I’ve been otherwise, and most pleasantly, engaged. I met up again with an old friend whom I’ve known since we were at school togther in Bulawayo. I haven’t seen him in over thirty years, though neither of us could quite pin down whether it was the late 60s or the early 70s when we last met up. Anyway, John and his wife Mimi, who live in Florida, spent the afternoon with me and WotN, starting out with an excellent lunch at the favourite restaurant of the Geras family, the Great Kathmandu in Burton Road.
Catching up conversation: their kids, our kids, what they’d been up to, what we’d been up to. Reminiscing conversation: when John last saw this person, and when I did, and what was the name of the younger brother of the sisters Nola, Wendy and Carol – in fact, Peter – and the occasion on which John met up with our former Latin teacher in Cape Town, and the time in 1964 when he and I were driving past Hartsfield sports ground singing ‘Anyone who had a heart (boom boom) / would also have (boom boom) / a blood circulaa-aation’. We wandered back home from the restaurant for more such conversation and looking at photos and taking a couple.
How come you can remember the names of people you hardly even knew at school and haven’t seen in more than forty years, and often haven’t thought of in a decade or more, but you can’t remember the name of a movie you saw last month? How come I still know the names of Plumer Street and Moffatt Street and Peard Avenue, but I couldn’t tell you the names of roads just a stone’s throw from where I’m writing now? Huh?
Some of the talk was of you know which political questions, and there was a large measure of agreement between the four of us. In amongst it all, we caught a couple of BBC news broadcasts from which I gathered it was most seriously bad for Tony Blair that he was now moving towards an inquiry on what might have gone amiss with the intelligence on WMD. You know, I feel sure that had he not been moving towards one, it would have been (what’s the best way of putting this?) seriously bad for Tony Blair. Same old same old out there. Good day in here.