Repatriated after two months sur le continong, I walked down the sunny high street marvelling at English cheerfulness. A poster in the window of Lloyds bank showed two young chaps hugging joyfully below the words ‘He said yes!’ And a man loitering beneath these newly betrothed I recognised as my great friend Tom. When I think of Tom, I always think of a sentence of Max Beerbohm: ‘None, it is said, of all who revelled with the Regent, was half so wicked as Lord George Hell.’
Tom spotted me from 20 yards away and his expression changed from blandness to incredulity to that look of apology he always gives me as he remembers what happened the last time we broke bread, and the time before that. It could also be an apology offered in advance of the catastrophe that now lies ahead of us. We embraced every bit as passionately as the chaps in the Lloyds bank poster above us.
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