Rail travel is dull… commuters, routine and suburbs. Travel on the night train is exotic, dangerous and laden with possibility. Who will you meet in the dining car? What might happen as the locomotive screams through the night time? What strange goings on will happen in the homes flashing past the speeding express? What will the guard find in cabin 42 when he goes to wake the occupant with a tray of tea? What nightmares will haunt the sleepers as they lie in troubled conscience unconsciousness? And who shall we follow as the merry band of passengers disperse to the new day upon reaching the final destination?

It is gripping stuff.

The inherent drama and pregnant expectation within the closeted universe of the night train was captured beautifully in W. H. Auden’s poem Night Mail which was turned into a lovely piece of advertising for British Rail by my old agency, Lowe Howard-Spink.

Sleeper trains have played a big role, not just in the movies but in my life, too. ‘My life – the movie’ definitely features one famous sleeper: The Cornish Riviera Express. Less 1920s flapper dresses, DJs, silver service and Russian Grand Duchesses with their Lady’s maid in tow. More refugee cross Channel ferry bar stewards in crumpled uniforms, a packet of Bourbons and a solitary tea bag in a NAAFI tin tea pot rattling along the decrepit West Coast line.

The Night train – the Sleeper service – departs from Platform 1 at Paddington station at a quarter to midnight every night, except Saturday. It covers a distance of just 253 miles in six hours. It is an old school way to travel. By way of comparison, a flight from London Heathrow airport to JFK in NYC is 3,443 miles. It takes one hour less than the sleeper train. But on the night train, you get your own cabin, a proper bed and a it takes you direct into the heart of town.

You can board and enter your cabin from 1030pm. Between 2006 and 2013 I used it once a week each way, give or take. When we moved to Penzance from Clapham, my original plan had been to learn to fly, take a part share in a small aeroplane with some other London refugees and fly up and down from the airstrip at Land’s End. That plan, as they say, never really took off. And so, along with many other Cornish-based business folk, the Night train was my lifeline. I used to drop my bags in the cabin and then wander off back into Paddington for a pint or two at the Fountains Abbey pub on Praed Street. Or a nice steak and a few glasses of Malbec at a favourite hotel brasserie near the station. I doubt you can do that now – its just waiting for a novelist to set a terrorist attack on the train – as it would be easy to check in (no ID is required, just a ticket), drop a bag off with a bomb inside it and scarper.

I used to enjoy going along to the lounge car where you can sit in comfort (sleeper ticket holders hold the status of First Class), get a night cap (whisky being mine), watch the drama of the whistle blowing and the train pulling out of historic Paddington station, and sip your drink contentedly as the locomotive picks up speed through the window-lit suburbs of London until the darkness of countryside descends. The staff became familiar faces and occasionally you find yourself sitting opposite a famous person: I remember striking up a conversation with the lovely Eddie George, who lived in Bodmin in Cornwall, and had just retired as Governor of the Bank of England. He was just returning home from Hong Kong, where he had delivered a lecture on the future of the world economy for an exorbitant fee. Ensconced together for an hour as we departed London, I got the benefit of his thoughts for free.

From dawn, as the train enters Cornwall, the carriages resound to the sharp, metallic rap of the stewards giving passengers early morning alarm calls. As we stop at stations various – Plymouth, Liskard, Bodmin and Truro – passengers open the latch of their now well used cabins, extract themselves and their baggages and belongings, and shuffle, bleary eyed, along the corridor to the doors. The train spills its passengers onto the platforms, the doors shut noisily in a slam of percussion, and we head off again towards the last stop: Penzance. Threading through railway embankments, past gorse bushes with their tight, bright yellow flowers , scattering horses from their slumber with the noise of the engine, we huff and puff through the landscape of Cornwall until, at last, we emerge from our long night’s travel, to the coast and the magnificent sight of St. Michael’s Mount rising out of Mount’s Bay.

The train has slowed to a crawl now, tired and done for the day, and we limp, tired, into end of the line station. You can hear the sigh of the engine and the tic-tic-tic rhythm of the train as it stops and settles at journey’s end. All who remain, come to ground off the carriages and quietly move towards the taxis and town – home for some, holiday for others. Ready for rest. I always went straight to bed on getting home and straight to my room in London after arriving in Paddington – you need more sleep after the jolting and bumping journey. In truth, the train doesn’t deliver a great night’s sleep. It’s more the Dozer than the Sleeper service.

Often, for me, the night train was the start or end of a longer adventure, overseas. It started me on my way to Shanghai, Seoul, Singapore. Or west to America. Or south to Cape Town. Or north to Moscow. Or simply back home from all those distant lands. But whichever way I was travelling, once I got on board, adventure lay ahead. Either the adventure of new places and new people or of the glorious Cornish beaches and my two favourite people on the planet.

It may not be the Orient Express, but it’s a train you don’t want to miss.

I didn’t want to wake the children, though the lullaby sea took care of their slumber. The water was welcomingly cool and calm. The white sparks of the phosphorescence lit up the sea with every stroke and I submerged myself in its glow. A few strokes and I was with her. “Thank you for getting me up”, I said. There is little more magical than being afloat in a sea with your lover, striking distance from the shore of an Ionian Island. Every movement bringing a cascade of minute water sparks that mirror the canopy of Heaven above – like swimming in the night sky as an Olympian God, wreaking havoc in the Universe. Our limbs entwine under the water and send galaxies cannoning into one another.

We look up to the sky and smile. There is just love in the air around us. Our little boat rises and falls ten feet distant, a home adrift in space. We are cosmonauts of the ocean. As we tread water, we hold hands. This is bliss. Our quiet words float over the tips of the swell and we move back towards the boat. Pulling our bodies up the ladder in the stern, the evening air makes us sigh with pleasure. The warmth envelopes our wet skin and we are cool at last. The heave of the deck beckons us to sit in the stern and just breathe it all in.

Wrapped in a toga’d bedsheet, she whispers to our boy to come up from his sleep and swim. Blearily, he slides into the water. The spectacle of a billion creatures illuminating his limbs at every glide of his hands lights up his face. It is an unforgettable first and only adds to his smittenness with all things sea-soaked. Our sailor lad. Swimming like the Ancients on a third watch around our slumbering vessel. It is our night swim. Gentle, calm and ocean free.

The Ionian Sea, off the coast of Keffalonia, August 2019.

We took our cue for drinking from our faculty heads – Professor Allen Phillips Griffiths and his Jesuit sidekick, Cyril Barrett. They were both prodigious imbibers and at the inaugural session to welcome us to the Philosophy school they pleaded the case that we would all learn a lot more from arguing in the union bars over a pint than we would in lectures, and they heartily recommended we did this. We took them at their word, with the result that I had to resit my logic exams over the summer just to cling on to my place at Warwick. We took our bar studies seriously, several times being attacked and beaten up by other-minded fellow drinkers from the left of the political spectrum. One morning I awoke with a set of black eyes, earned in the Student Union Market bar, for singing Unionist songs and wearing black tie, and attended my politics tutorial with Professor Jim Bulpitt with the people who had set on me the previous night. It was a bear pit.

University was drinking. It was subsidised bars and pints-a-plenty. Bitter, lager, Guinness, mild, cider, scrumpy, pints of Pernod – anything that was on promotion at a pound a pint. The Pernod was a mistake. I have never been able to stomach it ever since. It was seats and tables sticky with beer and sweat. It was live music every night. It was pints at Union General Meetings. Dinner. Lunch. Even breakfast. All served with beer. It was, one memorable evening, dinner in a first floor communal kitchen in a Hall of Residence where the washing up consisted of chucking every plate, glass, mug and all the knives, forks and spoons out of the window. You don’t do that when you’re sober. It was the Westwood Mingle – an all day pub crawl around the arse end of Coventry where our accommodation was located – starting in a working mens pub and downing pints in one immediately followed by a tactical. A ‘tactical’ is a tactical chunder – making yourself sick in order to free up room for more beer. It all ended in the evening at a disco where everyone tried to “box off” whoever was willing. Beer makes for strange bed fellows.

In the summer holidays at the end of my second year I flew to America for three months on a BUNAC exchange. BUNAC is the British Universities North America Club and is an exchange programme where they come over here and we go over there for a summer as students to work, explore and experience another culture. We get the better deal. Some go to work in American Summer Camps – my girlfriend at the time did that. It seemed the worst option. Who wants to spend your whole summer looking after with brattish kids and being “Owl Chief”? Not me. Ripper, my uni companion on this trip, opted instead for finding work at Faneuil Hall in Boston, skinning fish and serving subs (giant sandwiches). Ok, it doesn’t sound glamorous, does it? But it was magnificent. Our work friends were all college students too, working their way through university like all US students do, by taking on summer jobs waiting tables. With our British accents, which we obviously hammed up, we were mini celebs and we paid for only five nights’ accommodation in 60 days. Every night, after our shift ended at 11pm and we had taken all the rotting seafood bones and scales to the dumpster, we joined our crew to go drinking at Serendipity, the bar over the other side of the Hall. All the restaurant crews met up here and the drinking went on until the small hours. Ripper and I – like all the other kids – had to be up and back at our jobs by 9am. We partied on regardless. Beer got us started – this is where I developed a taste for Sam Adams and Amstel, which was all the vogue then – but being Brits, we avoided the dreadful Bass that our US friends worshipped: served ice cold, supposedly proper British beer. The beers were chased down with Hawaiian sea breezes, a cocktail of vodka and cranberry juice. After two months in Boston, Rip, me and a waitress we were both in love with called Cindi Rittenhaus (who was relocating to San Francisco), took a “Driveaway” car across the states to California. We sampled several beers on the way through New York State, Kansas, Colorado and into California where we fell for Anchor Steam. But it was a dry old ship in Salt Lake City, capital of the Mormon and abstentionist state of Utah. Nevada wasn’t much better.

After university I began work and discovered those lovely Victorian London pubs. London Pride. Then I moved north to Tetley-land in Leeds. I was hired to sell Yorkshire TV’s experiment in through the night broadcasting, which was called MusicBox. Odd to remember that TV transmission on just 4 channels stopped promptly at midnight in the 1980s. But the launch kept getting delayed so I had nothing else to do than go to the (again subsidised) bar in YTV Studios on the Kirkstall Road and get smashed on Guinness. Four or five pints was the usual lunchtime amount. My regional sales colleagues thought nothing of this; it was standard practise and often they would either drive off on their rounds to talk to the advertising agencies of Leeds or to clients or, in one case, to fly his two seater plane for a little afternoon’s light entertainment. I went up with him several times. We were both on the clock but this was normal. Business was, when MusicBox eventually came on stream, carried out at the Moortown Mecca, The Flying Pizza – restaurant to the media moguls of the North. Starting with a Peroni – unimaginably exotic in the 1980s – and moving on to a bottle or two of Frascati. Frascati was everywhere then. Now, it has virtually disappeared.

Yorkshire ale is wonderful. There are so many regional brewers. Masham gave us Theakstons. John Smith was famous outside Yorkshire for its advertising (done by BMP, the agency I would work for 10 years after) but which never ran in the county itself for fear of upsetting the locals. John Smith’s rival brother, Samuel Smith, brewed in the same small town, Tadcaster, but the beer is poor. I am not a Samuel Smith fan, in spite of the quaint packaging of yesteryear they wrap around their gaseous brew. Timothy Taylors – Landlord is a great beer – from the Bradford area. And my beloved Tetley, with its foaming head. Tetley was served in the Queen Anne pub at the back of the YTV studios and we delighted in taking visitors from the London sales office who had to show a leg “up North” every now and then – just to show willing, like – for a lunch of ‘pie and peas’. The look of revulsion on their faces as they were confronted with a hot pork pie drowning in mushy peas and topped off with vinegary mint sauce was always worth the wait. Tetley was poured from the font so that the server kept pulling and pulling in order to fill the pint and attain that legendary Yorkshire head on the pint that Northerners love and Southerners (where beer is served without a head) do not understand. But in order to achieve this peak-pint performance, the beer that spilled over the glass and hands of the pourer was syphoned back into the barrel to be recycled rather than disappearing for ever into the drip tray. Meaning that whatever germs of nail clippings were washed off the pourer’s hands went straight into the next pint. Lovely. What we called “flavour”. They aren’t allowed to do that anymore.

I returned to London in 1988 to begin working in advertising. London agency life was fuelled by beer (and wine and spirits – just like in the TV series Mad Men, only with English accents. It was especially so in the 1970s and 1980s. The best agencies had their own bars – we had one in Lowe Howard-Spink (subsidised again, naturally) where Whitbread was a client. Pints of Stella were de rigeur (we produced the Jean de Florette cinema ads and the brilliant line that made the beer famous: Reassuringly expensive) and I remember my Account director boss popping his head around my office door at 8pm on a Friday night as I was being sick into my wastepaper basket. This was perfectly normal. We used to congregate at the Grenadier on Friday lunchtimes and get hammered. Work finished at midday. The afternoon was for drinking. Or lunch. Preferably both. And people would start leaving for home at around 8.30pm.

Pubs fortunate enough to be located near ad agencies in London were sitting on a goldmine. Quite often, the chosen watering hole was grotty. The nearest pub to Lowe’s in its salubrious Bowater House offices in Knightsbridge was the ominously nicknamed “Stabber’s Arms” – so named because one unlucky drinker had been attacked there with a knife. Collett’s pub in Euston was no nicer. BMP’s was the sort of purpose built pub you find on dangerous housing estates of tower blocks in inner London areas. But whilst the venues were seedy, the company was invariably brilliant. Any excuse for a pint. A pitch win. A pitch loss. A leaving do. A new recruit. A new campaign. A Thursday night. One year, when BMP won the Foster’s beer account, the management took the entire agency on a booze train from Paddington to Bristol. No stops. No passengers other than staffers. Just one long drinking journey with an open free bar the whole way there and back. Commuters waiting on the platform at Reading and other stops down the line watched enviously as eight carriages’ worth of beautiful young things sped past at light speed in a blur of Foster’s induced partying and largesse.

Over the course of my career in advertising, I have been brand steward for a number of beer brands. Some lovely and some dreadful. The illustrious Marston’s Pedigree from Burton on Trent. A truly exceptional pint and we sold the campaign to the live reincarnation of the founder of the brewery in the form of his great grandson, now Chairman, be-whiskered and sitting directly under an imposing portrait of his forebear in the oak panelled Boardroom.

Newcastle Brown Ale, iconic, fizzy, filthy brew but a great brand. I remember being put on it as Board Account Director and flying up to Newcastle for the obligatory tour of the on-trade. We began in a Geordie Working Men’s Club. I wore my best London adman uniform: black polo neck top, dark grey trousers, shiny leather Oxfords on my feet. Everyone else was in their Friday night finery. I might as well have been wearing a badge that shouted “I’m a homosexual Londoner”. The looks I got. I felt like Dicky Beasley, the pony-tailed boy wonder from Viz comic whose dream was to grow up and become an advertising account executive. A ponce. Men holding three pints in their hands stopped on their way back from the bar to scan me from my toes to my hairstyle. Their scorn was evident in the sneering which accompanied a small but sad and disapproving shake of the head as they passed me by which effectively passed their unspoken verdict: “Puff” or “Wanker”. It was a tough night. Made worse by having to drink that shitty bottled filth, Newcastle Brown Ale. The Scottish & Newcastle conglomerate which owned Newky Brown also owned a variety of other second rate beers: Harp Lager, Gillsepie’s (a made up brand to compete with the wildly successful Caffrey’s Irish Ale) and 80 Shilling. All dreadful.

The volume days diminished when my children arrived. They couldn’t drink. This isn’t necessarily a drawback. My sisters remember being left outside the aforementioned Windmill pub in Linton with a bottle of pop and a bag of crisps whilst my father and their mother drank inside with their crowd of friends. But they couldn’t afford the rounds, so drinking became, by and large, a home hobby. Our family holidays in Majorca, at the C’an Canonge finca near Pollenca town, topped us up with rosado, white and red wine and a nice San Miguel or Estrella at the shank of the day to get us started. Beer with pistachios is a great way to begin the evening, and a good appetite whetter for the wine and brandy to come later.

Our move from London to Penzance brought in a whole new raft of beers, most particularly Doombar, which still tastes its best on pump in Cornwall although it is now seemingly omnipresent. The St. Austell beers are good and I enjoyed many a pint watching the rugby internationals in our Pz local pub and also celebrating wins of new business at one of two pubs where I would make a solitary pilgrimage: the beautiful Tinner’s Arms in Zennor for when I won a brand new client for our consultancy business, Caffeine, and the Halzephron Inn on the Lizard for when I won more assignments from an existing client. (You see? There was method in the madness.) On these trips, I would have just one pint of ‘Doom’ and raise my glass to the client. Along with lunch; always with food. There were other compensations for living in Cornwall: the Ship in Porthleven, the Gurnard’s Head near LandsEnd, the Maltsters Arms in Chapel Amble and the St. Kew Inn – being possibly my favourite pub in the world alongside the Craven Arms in Wharfedale. All brilliant purveyors of a glorious pint.

In truth, I am never happier than when in a pub and an hour or so in the company of a newspaper, a proper lunch and a pint is my idea of Heaven. I have never been miserable in a pub, even if I entered one in such a mood. The variety of all these hostelries juxtaposed with the familiarity of the protocols and the rituals of pub going, make them all a second home, and I can spot a great pub with a well trained glance. Thursday evenings at the Tinner’s in the company of some 23 musicians playing the Cornish pipes, guitars, fiddles and an array of instruments is a magical experience. And to top off your evening’s drinking with a night cap dram of whisky and a toddle over the courtyard to the cosy bedroom is a blissful end to any day and much to be recommended.

Holidays in Thorpeness every summer were also punctuated withe pints. Although dinner every evening, cooked by all of us in turn, staying in the different households scattered through the village, was always a wine affair, the Dolphin pub in Thorpe plus the Cross Keys and White Hart in Aldeburgh all served Southwold’s Adnam’s stable of beers. And Adnams Bitter is a lovely beer.

It was also in Thorpeness that I always had a pint of bitter shandy in the Clubhouse with dad after a round of golf. I always associate shandy with dad as a consequence. We transferred this ritual north when we played at Wetherby, his club. Dad always had a pint of gingerbeer shandy (bitter and ginger beer, half and half), where my preference has always been for lemonade shandy.

On the way to Thorpeness, journeying south from Yorkshire, we always new we were near when we started to see Tolly Cobbold pubs from the car. This meant we were getting near. It also made us laugh, as it sounded so funny to us as a name. Tolly has passed into history now. And in later years, I have grown to think of the Bury St. Edmunds brewer, Greene King, as maker of probably my favourite ale: Abbot Ale, winner of the prestigious Monde Gold Award in 2014. Abbot is best served at The George pub in Alfriston, Sussex.

Living in Sussex means there are lots of Harvey’s pubs and Harvey’s is another lovely hoppy ale. My favourite place to sup a pint is the John Harvey Tavern, adjacent to the brewery by the river in Lewes, where the beer hails from originally. Harvey’s shares Adnam’s Cambridge blue livery – perhaps that is why I am so taken with them both, as I am a sucker for this colour.

The pubs of the South Downs are often stunning and a few times we have been lucky enough to sit in the pub garden on a hot summer’s afternoon sipping a pint only to hear the unmistakable noise of the Rolls Royce Merlin engine of a Spitfire, as this British icon flies overhead on its return from an airshow or State occasion to Biggin Hill RAF airbase. One even performed a victory roll in the summer of 2020, which I have never seen before in real life nor will see again – they are supposed to be banned from such manoeuvres nowadays given the age of the planes – but what a sight! In an otherwise terrible year, it was a welcome signal.

My drinking companion of choice is Dom, or Louis Fairdrop as he styles himself when the booze is working. To his Louis, I become the Baron Ernst von Stollenheim. In the days when you could, we began our imbibing on the allocated day at 0500 in Smithfield where a pint of Porter could be had in the Market Tavern underneath the meat market, and many of the market’s porters availed themselves of this institution. After all, they had been hard at it all night and so were in need of a refreshment. Along with an early morning kickstarter fag, this was the traditional commencement to our Walk of wisdom – an all day and all evening and all…well, as long as we could stand, pub crawl. These are usually themed to take in all the legal pubs of London, or the ancient pubs of the City or, as was the case with the inaugural walk, the pubs along the river Thames. After Smithfield, which is also home to a fantastic pub called the Fox and Anchor, where they purvey a very line in pies, we cabbed to Simpson’s on the Strand for a proper gentleman’s breakfast. With Champagne. And a Bloody Mary.

On that first walk, we then ambled along the Embankment to the river boat which took us all the way down to the official start line of our pilgrimage. The prospect of some 21 pubs and inns stretched out before us. It was a glorious prospect. Dom is one of those people where you can gabble and laugh or just sit in companionable silence; he is the quintessence of the Bar Stool Philosopher. We disembarked at Greenwich pier and walked East along the towpath , past the redundant concrete works to the Nelson pub. Opting to take the appropriate drink of the time of day, we began with a pint of bitter and then ambled along to the Yacht, where we had a glass of Madeira, which seemed fitting for the hour. Another pint in the bow windowed seat of The Trafalgar Inn (it is my hope one day to hold a party upstairs in the plush, gold and scarlet upholstered Nelson Room) and then on to Rotherhithe and lunch at the Mayflower. A pint and a bottle of red.

Borough Market and the only Georgian galleried Inn left in London, The George. Another pint. Across the Bridge and another cab ride to Wapping and the notorious pubs of that manor: the Prospect of Whitby, the Grapes in Limehouse, the Captain Kidd, Turner’s Old Star. By now we are quite merry. To Soho and the Crown and Chairman. Some other pubs. A green doored Speakeasy I couldn’t ever find again but which Dom seemed to know the secret password for. And back to the bar at Home House, where we were sharing a bed, Laurel and Hardy style, for the night. Twenty one establishments. And Dom was up and fit as a flea in time to catch the 0720 from King’s Cross. Outstanding behaviour.

This tradition continues, two decades later. Dom “doesn’t do solids” as he puts it, but we have drunk our skins full and I need food to soak up the alcohol. So we often break up the booze with the nicer eating establishments London has to offer: Langan’s Brasserie usually does the trick. We have pubbed in Hammersmith and Chiswick, Clapham and Wandsworth, in the City and in Brighton. So much more to do and so little time…

Work has also taken me on drinking extravaganzas and introduced me to some lovely brews: Budweiser in Prague; Leffe in Bruges; Effes in Istanbul; Tsing Tao in Shanghai; Kirin in Tokyo; Lion lager in Cape Town; Grolsch in Amsterdam; Weissbier in Munich; Piva (live beer) in Russia. This last one, best taken to rehydrate yourself in a Banya (think sauna with a bar) with good company and some snacks. And Guinness in Dublin, of course. But don’t go on St. Patrick’s day – all bars are shut in deference to the Man. All except the bar at Dublin’s main train station where you can buy a drink if you have a ticket for travel that day. My ambition is to make it for Bloom’s Day one 16 June.

Then there are all the holiday beers: Mythos and Fix in the Peloponnese. Phoenix in Mauritius. Wadadli in Antigua. Kalik in Bermuda. Chang and Singha in Thailand. And a little local twist on a French pression when you add Picon, the orange liqueur, which gives you a nice kick. I learnt this last one when working in the French Alps in Morzine and it became my preferred way to drink beer in the winter cold up there in the mountains.

Beer is my friend. The lubrication of sorrow and the enhancer of fun. A pint is a joy. Company enough for one but a welcome addition to any throng. It is a fundamental part of the human story, having been part of our history since about 3500BC. It has been responsible for some horrendous historical blunders, for countless relationship breakups; it has also cemented many marriages, loosed the inhibitions of those born a drink too short. It is a leveller, a companion, a small but potent ally; a dangerous enemy if given control. It can heighten the confidence and gag the articulate. It is a fiend and a lover. It is class in a glass and the dregs of despair. The world always looks rosier through the bottom of a glass that has contained it and it is a marvellous accompaniment to all manner of pleasures. I am a fan. It has given me untold tales as well as told. The madness that lies in its innocuous promise of quenched thirst is celebrated in poetry and plays around the world. But mostly, it has been the common denominator to a lifetime of happy and funny memories. This is to say thank you to all the crafts people from around the world who have produced the liquid lubrication which has oiled the friendship of decades that I have enjoyed. And to all the publicans and bar staff who have poured me a pint, cleared away the empties and replenished the same. Here’s to you all. Cheers.

When I lived in Cornwall, Pedn Vounder was my office. If you calculate my life in numbers during the years we lived in Cornwall, you will see why. In the years between 2006 and 2013, when I left to go and live in Brighton, I ran my consulting business, Caffeine, from Penzance. We jokingly described it as ‘Caffeine West Coast’, as if we were a business with a base in California. Being in business worldwide when you are based a six hour train journey from London – from where my business world started (there was no real business to be had in Cornwall itself) – means I travelled a lot. A lot a lot. My commute was the Cornish Riviera Night Train, a crawling, quaint service between Penzance and Paddington station which covers the 306 miles between 10pm and 0530am every night except Saturday. It chugs along, occasionally breaking down, through fair weather and foul, delivering people like me from Truro, Bodmin, Plymouth and Exeter ‘up the line’ (as the Cornish refer to anywhere beyond the county’s border). On this train, I travelled most weeks, clocking up the equivalent distance of going around the world five and a half times. That’s some 600 journeys or 137,500 miles. And that’s before I set off for anywhere else – that was just to get to Heathrow airport.

From my office on the beach, I could look up and see but not hear all the planes as they departed UK airspace for destinations all over the world. And when I was on that beach, it meant that I was at home – either just returned from a mega-journey overseas and recuperating (decompressing as I call it) or storing up sunshine before embarking on another marathon. So looking up, I would always say a muttered prayer to thank God I wasn’t on that plane.

I lived on planes. My passport from those days is a tapestry of stamps and visas. Cambodia, Turkey, multiple USA entry stamps, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Singapore, Japan, Thailand. The long haul trips were usually 10-21 days, often two or three centres, running courses and workshops and training programmes. In the 2006-2013 period, I clocked up some 400,000 air miles, or another 15 times around the world. No wonder I needed a rest.

And when I got home, I crashed, often for two or three days. The jet lag, for one thing. The exhaustion for another – each gig demanded a lot. When you are running workshops or making speeches at conferences back to back it takes a lot out of you. You are on your feet all day. You are also thinking on your feet all day, too. You are giving huge quantities of energy all day to keep the workshop lively and the audience stimulated. And you are often working at night to be at dinners or planning the next day or writing the next proposal to keep the plane in the air. So landing at Heathrow and then schlepping back on the train all the way to Penzance was often a 20 hour journey.

Once home, the beach beckoned. And it was always Pedn. Although I never joined the intimate beach cabal that was the nudist colony, I did strip off. The sand was warm, the soundtrack was waves and gull song and the days I went were always hot – this beach doesn’t do for dour weather. Treen, the nearest village, is two miles away and that’s where you park your car, so you need to travel light: a backpack, shorts, shirt and shoes. Easy to carry, easy to take off. The walk is down a track and eventually you dog leg left at the big rock formation and walk down the side of the cliffs. The last part is a scramble over rocks and a short slide down the rock face on to the beach. It’s not lazy-friendly, which is why it doesn’t get crowded – the tourists stay stuck in Porthcurno.

The tidal reach isn’t huge but that’s a bonus for when the tide is out and the beach is stretched before you, there are ankle deep lagoons that get left by the sea and you can walk from one end of the beach to the other. I occasionally promenaded to the far rocks naked. It is liberating to wander and feel the breeze. And it feels surreal to bid good morning to people as you pass each other’s gaze. It gives you strength when you are wearing only a smile. “I have nothing to hide” it says. “Here I am, and I am fearless.” Swimming is also a joy and as you emerge from the water in the warm sunlight and back across the sands to your towel, you feel renewed.

Looking up and seeing the plane 35,000 feet above me, imagining myself looking down from the window seat at the last of the land disappearing from sight, I feel smug. All that hard work, all that hard travel, affords me the opportunity to do this. My phone goes. It is a client. She can hear the gull cries and says it sounds beautiful. “You should see it”, I say. I tell her I am on the beach. “Do you want me to call back later?” she asks. “No, no. It’s fine. I work from here all the time”. This is part of the image I like to create in my clients’ minds because people equate beaches with leisure and people who spend lots of time on beaches must be either very lazy or very successful. Most people fill in the gap with the latter rationale. I do not disabuse them of this conclusion. It helps me keep my prices high.

I am naked and my eyes are closed with my face turned to the sun. I picture my client in her stuffy City office surrounded by computer terminals and people in suits. I plug in my earphones, give a little wave to the aeroplane above and think God, how lucky I am.

In the UK, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, we love a Club. Well, at least some of us do. I do not mean Working Men’s Clubs, the Wheel Tappers and Shunter’s Club or the Batley Variety Club, lovely as I am sure they are. I mean a Club club, with a capital C. They used to be known as Gentlemen’s Clubs, but now, in an age when most (but not all) admit women members, they tend to be described as Private Members Clubs.

London is, of course, the Mecca for such institutions, although this is no big surprise when you understand that they were originally intended as a home from home for the Squirearchy when up in the Capital attending to business or for the Season. Pall Mall and St James’ Street is associated with these private members clubs most popularly, playing home to such bastions of privilege as the Athaneum, the Oxford and Cambridge, and the Carlton Club (the Tory Party’s spiritual HQ). My father joined the Lansdowne Club, which was a pioneer in its days as it opened expressly with both male and female members in 1935 when no other London club accepted women members. Clubs have recIprocal arrangements with other Clubs, both in London and overseas. The Lansdowne, when bedrooms are overbooked, has a reciprocal with both the Carlton Club and the Caledonian (think Scotland in the heart of the Sassenach capital). I have stayed at both several times. When the doorman at the Carlton greeted me in my refugee status as there was ‘no room at the Lansdowne Inn’, his words were: “Welcome to a proper Club, Sir” – both welcoming me and insulting my Club (and therefore me) in the same breath.

Oh yes, there is a hierarchy between clubs. My father always thought that anyone joining the RAC, for example, was rather infra dig. Snobbery is rife. And visiting the Caledonian as an Englishman you are enveloped in a world where everything is inverted: villains and traitors to England are here hallowed as heroes and have busts, statues and rooms named after them. Clubs are a microcosm of the world view they subscribe to: dine at the Carlton and you eat under the gaze of vast portraits of Lord Salisbury and Disraeli. Walk downstairs and you pass under the hawkish gaze of Lady Thatcher. If you want to use your mobile phone in the Lansdowne, you must go underground, literally, to the sports area and closet yourself in one of three old telephone booths so that any call is punctuated with the sound of a friendly assault from the fencing piste or the thud thud thud of a squash game. Clubs don’t like modern technology, especially of the telecommunications kind. In the Caledonian, you’ll feel right at home if your home is 20,000 acres of moorland peopled only by tartan wearing Highlanders and the odd 14 pointer stag. Oh, and if your tableware is primarily made of rams horns gilded in silver.

Which is where the new generation of London Clubs has found its place: to give a home to people who live and work in the C21st. Less stuffy, less formal, more entrepreneurial. Started by the Groucho – which is so named in remembrance of Groucho Marx’s famous utterance that he wouldn’t join a club that would have him as a member – I have been a member of a few of them. Century Club in Soho, handy for business meetings in the centre of town and Home House in Portman Square, which is a lovely Robert Adam building. Like Frazier, I used to get a warm buzz out of telling my then secretary that “if anyone needs me I will be at my Club”. I know, I know. But I did – I do; I simply can’t help myself.

In the 2000s I conducted most of my business at Home House and delighted in the marquee set up in the garden where you could not only eat a lovely lunch , drink lovely wine and conduct lovely business, you could also watch lovely Wimbledon tennis matches on the lovely widescreen TV. It was just…lovely. I have spent many a pleasant afternoon in good company in the Drawing Rooms on the first floor and evenings in the sumptuous bedrooms upstairs.

Being a member of a Club seems to be still a thing. This is perhaps surprising given the more emancipated and egalitarian world we live in. Then again, people seem to like privilege. I do. I like exclusivity. I like life behind the ‘velvet rope’. Knowing people who are members of other clubs is another delight. The super successful Soho House Group is a frequently visited list of venues courtesy of my friend Simon and their NYC establishment is always lots of fun. I have visited the Frontline Club (war correspondents), the Conduit (philanthropists), the Arts Club in Mayfair (three guesses), One Alfred Place (business), Century Club (West End showbiz), the Army & Navy, the Liberal Club., the Foreign Correspondents Club in Cambodia, the Tower in Singapore. As I say, I love a Club. But I have yet to visit White’s, Boodles, the Garrick or Annabel’s. Plus I would like to visit the Tanglin in Singapore and a couple in India. (Maybe it’s a Colonial thing.)

Ever since I watched Around the World in 80 days as a boy, Clubs have held the mystique of a grown up world of glamour, adventure and excitement. Phileas Fogg set off on his adventure from the Reform Club and those early associations with old men slumbering under broadsheet newspapers, of gin and tonics on the veranda in Colonial Clubs from Kenya to Calcutta, of be-turbaned servants bearing silver salvers of correspondence to members sitting in their wingback studded leather armchairs, of full size billiard tables, of countless conversations leading to hazardous enterprises, have worn heavily on my imagination. So many films portray the Club as that quintessentially British institution. They have been the backdrop for so many escapades, from Bertie Wooster’s Drone’s Club to the splendour of the fictitious Viceroy Club in the film The best exotic Marigold Hotel, to Rudyard Kipling’s encounter with his own character creations Peachy Carnahan and Daniel Dravot, who go on to conquer all of Kafiristan and inherit the treasure of Alexander the Great and the unfaithful cast of the film White Mischief. Clubs are sexy. Clubs are behind closed doors – forbidden to most, accessible by the few. And, as we all know, scarcity makes things more desirable.

Yes. I have indulged many a glorious hour in my Clubs. Though I am not very clubbable. I am not a joiner-inner. I am not sociable and I rarely wander the rooms, make conversation with other members or attend Club functions. That, for me, is beside the point. I am content to keep my own company or invite my friends in to enjoy the place. It is a charmed life behind the doors of privilege and once in a while, that is just what you need.

West Riding is people who still need to be near work where work is industrial, not agricultural. Entrepreneurs. Second generation industrial family businesses – textiles, engine parts, chain manufacturers, shampoo magnates. Private dentists. Sharp suits from Brills in Moretown (not country togs from Allens in Harrogate). The tang of a Yorkshire accent. Conspicuous displays of wealth – lions rampant at the wrought iron gates of their new build mansions, swimming pools, repro furniture (all bought, none inherited) and, in the 70s, the latest Jaguar.

I remember a workmate of mine reminiscing about his early teen years in 1970s Milton Keynes. He was smiling at his own recollections of those days and reeling off experiences, musical references, activities, descriptions of his school and food that I had absolutely no similar parallels for – he may as well have been describing a childhood in another country.

He was describing a childhood in another country. His childhood was perfectly normal, where both parents worked, holidays happened once a year, food was unbothered by The Galloping Gourmet or M&S avocado pears, school was a bog standard comprehensive, music was The Clash or The Jam and Saturdays were spent in the shopping centre hanging out at McDonald’s and WH Smith.

To help understand how these worlds were so different, when they both collided – which they did at university – a girlfriend of mine, when quizzed about her exposure to normal people by our new working class chums (sic), caused gales of incredulous laughter when she referred to them as ‘the lower orders’. And it became a running joke that we thought they all lived, rather quaintly, off tick (credit) at the local shop, like some cheeky, strike-a-light cockneys from a Dickensian landscape. A friend of ours saw a photo of me around this time. He was a Scouser. Done very well. Had a spot of bother with the police as a lad. And he described my face as ‘very punchable’. It was. And it was punched at university. But thats another story.

My school was founded in 627AD. No, that’s not a misprint. It had just celebrated its 1,350th birthday when I arrived at it. The school motto was ‘Super antiquas vias’ – along ancient paths. It wasn’t overly progressive. Some of the dormitories were decked out in the original furniture. Well, it felt like that. Our most famous old boy was one Guido Fawkes. Come the 5th November every year, whilst the rest of England was making merry burning effigies of the man who symbolised Catholic revolt against persecution by the government and who tried to blow up Parliament with gunpowder, we alone did not celebrate the night. We simply didn’t burn old boys.

It wasn’t just school that was different. My home was different. Technically, it was a four bedroom semi. Technically. But it wasn’t really. When my wife – a Soviet girl (ah, the irony) – asked to see a picture of where I lived from 1969-1986, I showed her a Georgian Manor house, draped in Virginia Creeper, eight foot high windows, acres of roof and a tennis court all surrounded by a gravel driveway, neatly mowed lawns, tall oak trees, a little cottage, other outbuildings and a stable block, all at the end of a 800 foot driveway. She asked:’ How many of you lived there?’ “Three of us…”, I replied. “well, and the servants”. Her eyes widened. Her mouth moved but no sound came out. “You’re…you’re bourgeois!” she eventually exclaimed. Oh yes. I am definitely bourgeois.

For a Soviet girl, raised as a Young Pioneer under the gaze of Comrade Lenin, it was a crime to have so few people living in such a big house. ‘Your house would have been partitioned – a bit like India (well, it was marginally smaller than India). Every room would have had a whole family in it and everyone would have shared the kitchen.’ This sounded more like the home my great grandparents might have had before they escaped the slums. Their hard work has made it possible for us not to have to share rooms. This didn’t wash with Tanya, and only added to her suspicion of my counter-revolutionary tendencies. A suspicion confirmed when I took her and our daughter – half Soviet, half capitalist – to visit the family’s dirty little secret: our dark, Satanic Mill in industrial Batley.

Yes. We were mill owners. Owners of Victoria Mills. Two generations ago our family had moved away from the valley where the mills were. The advent of the motor car enabled that, as it was no longer necessary to live up the hill overlooking the place of work. The Keans moved north of Leeds. To clean air and fields and big ‘ouses. They sent their children to public schools. They cowered outside the gates in their Bentleys, their children ashamed to be seen in the company of people ‘oo ‘ad flat vowels and d’int speak proper. And bit b’ bit, generation by generation, we became posh. Posh enough to live in a Manor House – even if it was only a semi-detached one. But the money still got made in t’mill.

Batley is a grimey place. In the Churchyard up on the hill top overlooking the mill, the gravestone of my great grandfather stands sandstone black with the pollution of the years. It nestles among the long, unkempt grass, stiff, like the Victorian values of the gentleman that lies beneath it.

We toured the Mill down in the valley beneath. Nowadays it is a Habitat and Heals store. When I used to work there – cleaning the directors’ cars – it was a noisy working mill, making shoddy, the poor grade woollen yarn that makes blankets and army uniforms. Tanya also comes from a textile area of Russia and studied textiles as part of her economics degree. Here we were – the workers’ heroine in the red corner and the son of a son of a son of a son who was the fourth generation of an ‘exploitative’ mill owning dynasty. The Proletariat versus the Bourgeoisie. What does that make our daughter? We visited the cafe. Our daughter sat, unbidden, at the head of the table. Imperious. I think she knows which side her bread’s buttered on. I’m not sure she’s a worker.

My childhood of the seventies. No hanging out at McDonald’s. No Clash. Or Jam. Just Pink Floyd, Genesis and records of Beyond the fringe and Pete and Dud. Stone school corridors, cricket and rugby. My parents giving dinner parties where everyone came dressed in black tie or evening dresses. (Dad looked lovely in his evening gown.) After dinner, the men went to the Drawing room and discussed business and world affairs. I do not know what the women talked about. None of them had jobs.

In winter, I went down the field and shot things. In summer, we played or watched tennis, went to friends’ houses to swim or rode our bikes around the country lanes. When we moved in to our semi detached Manor house, I remember putting my arms out wide and spinning around on the wooden floor of the Hallway, looking up to the corniced ceiling of the upstairs floor some fifty feet above me saying: “I feel like a King!”. I did. I do. It was a privilege to live in such grandeur. It feels like a bygone age. Above us was a military air corridor. Throughout my childhood, Vulcan bombers screamed overhead on manoeuvres, practising for the confrontation with a USSR that clearly meant to take all this away from us. And now it has. Not by force. But with love. It is a different world.

How did I get here? The final straw was standing out on the wing in a freezing field at Hymers College in Hull, a school out on the eastern wing of northern England, as horizontal rain needled into my legs and my hands turned blue. The ball never made it past the outside centre, who was a Death or Glory boy. As he buried his fifth try right next to the corner flag with his characteristic leaping dive and stood, ruddy with exertion, basking in the ruffled-hair plaudits of our team mates, I sullenly slunk back to my position ready for the kick off and silently vowed that this would be my last appearance on the field of play. From now on, I would not be keeping company with mere mortals, but with the heroes of my imagination: the aforementioned Monsieur Delon, Bogart and Bacall, the celluloid fantasy that was Mariel Hemingway in Woody Allen’s ‘Manhatten‘. With Vito Corleone. With Martin Sheen, traveling up the Mekong Delta to terminate Colonel Kurt’s command ‘with extreme prejudice’. They would be my team mates from now on.

To be honest, by slinking off to the cinema, I was doing us all a favour. I was neither use nor ornament on the rugby pitch, and I doubt my team mates even noticed I wasn’t on the wing anymore. The hole my absence left was more penetrating in attack than I had ever been and was less of a risk in defence. You never really knew whose side I was on – my actions on the pitch being as much to the advantage of our opposition as to my own side at least half the time. I had caused the under 16s committed Christian team coach to wash his hands of me, Pontius Pilot style, and even to curse (under his breath) at my lack of love for getting dirty. My parents were more interested in my academic progress than my sporting prowess – they had had their fill of standing on bitterly cold touchlines supporting my two older brothers. And Inside Centre Glory Boy certainly didn’t need me. In three years on the wing, the ball only made it past him once to me and I scored my only try of an ignominious career before hanging up my boots for good. No one would miss me. I was safe and safer in the cinema.

In here I was cocooned from the cold. I hated the cold and the whole rigmarole of changing rooms, physical larking about, spraying each other with Deep Heat, getting muddy and being the last line of defence as the opposition team’s Goliath bore down on me and my home try line. I bitterly resented having to throw myself under his studded heels. So I didn’t (once caught, twice shy). Instead, I opted for the gullible defender strategy – he feigned left and I went with him towards the touchline, only for him to cut inside, accelerate and steam past me. I altered course and got a hand on him, but too late – he got past me. I perfected the look of disappointment and frustration that I had been bettered. I was fooling no one. Certainly not when it happened for the four thousand, seven hundred and fifty-first time. I mean, how gullbile can one man be? It was not a piece of acting that would have convinced even the half dozen sports refugees in the matinee performance.

My education in film continued uninterrupted through O levels (GCSE) and A levels. I was an avid student and diligent. I never missed a film at the Odeon matinee performances. ‘Apocalypse Now’. ‘The Godfather’. ‘Annie Hall’. ‘Bananas’. ‘Love and Death’. ‘Play it again, Sam.’ (Yes, there is a lot of Woody Allen – who knew back then? And they are still very funny films, if you like neuroticism. And I did and still do.) Plus all the oldies: ‘The 39 steps’. ‘The Big Sleep’. And all the arty, subtitled classics from France and Czechoslovakia. And through all of them, I chain smoked Gitanes and Gauloises to the point of feeling sick. Every cigarette ignited with my prized, brass, Philip Marlowe-esque, GI standard issue Zippo lighter. When I left the cinema, I pulled the collar of my specially bought Crombie three quarter length overcoat up against the rainy wind and tipped my Trilby hat brim down to cover my eyes. Hunkered against the weather, I lit another Gitanes and slouched back to school, watching for trouble all the way, as any good Samourai would.

These were happy days. I had three years of cinema going and it educated me in the art form. I am still transported to magical kingdoms when I walk into the darkness to find my seat. The whole feel of the cinema. The plush curtains. The screen. The Pearl and Dean:”pa…pa..pa…pa…pa…pa…pa…papapaaaa…pa!” The trailers. The curtains pushing back a little further at each end to widen the screen ready for the main feature. It is magical. And nowadays, I have grown to love rugby. I love it. The game. The tournaments. The atmosphere. The physical effort. The camaraderie. The plays. The tussle. Even the glory boy dives. Yes, I love every aspect of the game. On the silver screen or watched from the safety of row 20, seat 17 in the stands. Some habits never die.

We were staying at the Casa del Mar hotel. Every morning we were picked up by limo and taken to the client’s offices. All we had to do was stand outside the hotel and get in the car. And get out at the other end. For five days we worked with the leadership team on their business development strategy – prospecting, pitching, growing existing clients, client clinics and setting up the Way to Win system. I flounced about around the flip charts, Cowpey did all the intellectual heavy lifting and writing up of what we agreed at the end of every day. He was always the consummate pro. Thorough. Logically tough. No detail escaped his attention. The relaxed vibe of the place meant we were usually done by 6pm, which gave us five free nights. Cowpey would always need to go to his room for a smoke (have you tried smoking in California?), to call Jane and to write up the notes from the day and email them to the client. He was always done by 7.30pm. The night was ours.

We would meet up in the hotel bar. Of course. A horse shoe affair, with TV screens at various vantage points on which played an unending stream of baseball – it was the season. One night, when I was fed up with watching indecipherable innings without understanding a word of the commentary, Chris painstakingly explained the rules to me. I doubt I could regurgitate them now but then they were crystal clear. He was good at making the complicated seem simple and at making the convoluted straightforward. As many clients and colleagues would attest. It was his gift. We followed our preliminary beers with a stroll. The stroll always led to the same door. Via the boardwalk and the pretty people, we unCalifornians ambled – Chris, rumpled, ash splattered, ebullient. Me, un-chiseled, pale, looking forward to another round.

On our second night we happened upon a raw bar. One of those fantastic, welcoming, informal seafood places right on the foreshore. The guy welcomed us at the door and had us at ‘hello’. He got we were English and talked us through the menu. We had a beer in our hands before we even sat down. It was the shank of the day and the orange glow of Pacific coast sunlight bathed everything in a moment of divine content. The menu included chowder, steamers, mussels, clams, cracked crab and oysters. Oysters. Oysters and a bottle of white. Then another. We drank a prodigious amount, but it never felt like too much with Chris. Not that night. Or the subsequent three. And in the morning, we waited for the car to pick us up. Undamaged but stored with the sunlight, wine and conversation from the night before.

It was a glorious time spent with one of my favourite people ever.

Cowpey. My but he was good company. I loved him – his irascibility, his generosity, his intellect, his compassion. His urge for fun. Ed Docx, the author and one time account man at our old advertising agency, once said of Cowpey that he was ‘the only man you could catch a heart attack from’. It was the best description of a man who was as intense and as frenetic as a double espresso. He was always a powder keg of brains only seconds away from combustion. Those who worked late into the smoking fuelled night with him, as he furiously scribbled pitch charts, could almost feel the intellectual energy coursing through his bloodstream but hardening their arteries. He was dangerous to be around. And, when in full verbal flight, he was marvellous to behold, too.

I vaguely remember the day times and the work we did. But the velvet evenings walking, talking, laughing, eating, drinking and, well, just sitting in ease together, they were time out and time away from all cares. Chris and I travelled mile after air mile together in our work for Caffeine. We shared shisha pipes by the Bosphorus on the day Chris spotted 17 briefs hidden in the speech we had heard from the head of Unilever when no one else in the audience had spotted one.

We spent too many but not enough well lubricated evenings at Airedale Avenue and at Alverne Hay in my Penzance home. We flew to Hong Kong and straight off the plane to a party. He gave a tour de force of a presentation at the Entrepreneurs Club there the next day and again in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. We stood in front of Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow in a photo taken by my future wife (we met on that day). We burnt midnight Chardonnay at the Chocolate Factory on 11th avenue working on some of the biggest pitches in our careers.

We were in the lobby of the Atlanta hotel at 0500 hours to clap the Ogilvy team out of the door on their way to make the pitch for UPS. We wept with laughter at the hopeless decisions we had made about the business. We blew along the gale storm promenade of Penzance many times and were crestfallen when we challenged the cafe owner on Praa Sands to guess what work we did and he guessed ‘you be advertising types’ first go (was it the clothes?). We drank our way through board meetings in Bath, Exeter, York, Plymouth, the Soho Grand. And through it all, Chris was always the voice of reason, of caution, often of Cassandra. And Cassandra, as we remember, was always right.

I was always Sergeant Lewis to Chris’ Inspector Morse. Luckily, I have a box set of memories. But when Morse went to LA, it was a particularly special episode. Glass in hand, the day’s work done, discoursing on a favourite topic, he was the most alive of men. Like the sun that was our backdrop on those LA evenings, he could be fiercely bright. But in his setting, he was even magnificent – gentle and kind and friend to all.

We lived in Penzance between 2006 and 2013. Every summer, I tried to drag my two sons to the annual airshow at RNAS Culdrose, near Helston on the Lizard. It was a hopeless endeavour. They never shared my Baby Boomer generation’s veneration for military aircraft: the Spitfire, Hurricane, the P-51 Mustang, the ME109, the B-17 USAF Flying Fortress, the Lancaster bomber. And that was just WWII. Then there were the French Mirages, the MiG Soviet fighters, the F-15s and the Russian Bear. Every year I tried. On the one year I managed to get them both to come with me, it was fogged out – a frequent problem in that damp part of the Atlantic world. The promised Red Arrows were a no show. Ditto the Spits. This confirmed every prejudice they had against the show.

And then. And then. 2010. 28 July. This would be different. This year they were expecting a visit from the last Vulcan flying in the world. Making its last appearance. A big day. My entire aviation childhood was exemplified in this magnificent aeroplane. I wanted to see her fly for the very last time. And, reluctantly, Josh came with me to see, but mainly to hear her.

All the way there I talked of her sleek lines but mainly of the thunderous engine noise. “I get it, dad. It’s loud.” You could hear Josh’s eyebrows rising with exasperation. “Loud doesn’t do it justice”, I continued, carried away on a fervour of nostalgia mixed with anticipation. We arrived and parked up. There were the usual medley of nondescript ancient aircraft on the ground to gawk at and clamber over and inside. The hours went by. The Royal Moroccan Airforce’s Acrobatic Team did some rather pedestrian manoeuvres up above the crowd against the backdrop of an azure sky. Ho, hum, all rather humdrum.

My ears pricked up way before anyone saw the Vulcan coming in from the South. It had evidently flown in an arc around Culdrose, shifting from its original flight approach path to an approach which would show the plane off to best effect. “She’s here”, I said to Josh. “Where?”. “Look over there”. I pointed to the south. “There’s nothing there, dad.” “Ssh. Listen“, I implored.

Then we saw her *. A great boomerang shape about 3 miles out and just 25 degrees off the deck, belching smoke out of the massive engines. Josh still wasn’t impressed but he picked up on the hushed sense of excitement amongst the crowd. I passed him the binoculars. The tannoy had picked up on the direction of the crowd’s gaze by now and the deep, clipped tones of all airshow announcers everywhere chimed in to announce the imminent arrival of the star of today’s show. There was a run down on the Vulcan’s active service credits and some bunny about the tech spec. Within 30 seconds the announcer was drowned out as the Vulcan passed overhead, her huge underbelly seemingly within arms reach. I looked at Josh. There was a broad smile all the way across his face. The magic was working.

The Vulcan did a few more turns to re-approach and fly past overhead, then, the moment all we fans had been waiting for: she pulled a vertical climb right above the crowd and switched on the afterburners. You could feel the force. It shook you. It shook the ground under our feet. It shook the sky. Speech was pointless. We stole a glance at each other as the plane climbed. Josh grimaced and then smiled to say “That is quite loud, actually” and we both smiled. Every car alarm in the car park was set off by the vibration which made us both laugh.

She climbed and climbed. And climbed. This was one impressive aircraft. She may have a terrifying purpose – to deliver Britain’s nuclear payload if required – but out of a sombre raison d’etre was produced an aircraft capable of withstanding most of what could be thrown at it whilst operating at an extraordinary level of performance. And she sounded like the God of fire she was named after. She didn’t disappoint.

In the car, which, felt very puny after what we had just experienced, Josh had a newfound respect for one of my hyperbolic childhood reminiscences. (Only 49 to go.) He had witnessed the flying of a legend into the history books. And it did not go gentle into that good night. It raged against the dying of the light. Just as a God should.

* The 2010 RNAS Culdrose Airshow appearance by the Vulcan is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTPNR6-FIEk

Wolfe’s ex-wife has arrived at this calm destination. It is not a show of bravery. It is not a charade, a front. It is genuine. She is indifferent – not angry, not scornful, not bitter. Nor mocking. In that single line we know that she has travelled through all of these feelings just to get to here. The wheel has turned and now she is okay. This once fragile woman, shattered, has repaired. Mended herself. The pieces that once lay shattered on the floor after she was dropped have been re-assembled. And they are stronger and more beautiful.

The title for this piece is inspired by the female equivalent of Tom Wolfe who walked in and then crashed out of my life. I am indifferent to her fate now, but I have paid in full. I paid in cash and in small denomination instalments. Over many years. She really was my mistakiest mistake. But she was my mistake. I do take full ownership of that fact. I invited her and her bag of woes in, gave everything to her bottomless need for more and traded my surety for her indecision. The damage inflicted altered me – for the best, I believe. It forced me to retreat deep inside myself. I spent a whole winter in social isolation as the crisis point to get through the hurt to the other side. My one room apartment in a picturesque Alpine village was my cocoon. I hid there. Asked questions of myself. Sweated, wept, howled, raged, pounded the walls, smashed the mirror, kicked holes in the door. Wailed and cursed God. And calmed in the sorrowful time it afforded me. When April came, the sun blazed and the snow melted on the lower slopes. I walked in the woods and felt life return to my bones. Butterflies appeared to symbolise the metamorphosis. They have made me smile ever since.

When I returned home to Britain in late Spring, I started anew. I never hid my emotional breakdown. It is part of me. It burnished me. And this is why I love that line from the film. I was reminded of it the other day when I learnt of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold. It is built on the idea that in embracing flaws and imperfections, you can create an even stronger, more beautiful piece of art. Relationships are like delicate ceramics. They should be handled with care. And our egos are just as fragile. My ceramic whole was smashed to smithereens but mended again. With gold. To hide the cracks and gloss over the fault lines of a break up or a breakdown is to miss the lessons it teaches. Instead, make them a golden part of the whole – visible, celebrated. They are what make one whole again. So whilst I am indifferent to the cause of the breakage, I am anything but indifferent to myself, for I am stronger than the original. All my flaws are on display for all the world to see. And that’s the way it should be because now there can be no self-delusion nor illusion for those who come near.