I went to a meeting of Town and Parish clerks and councillors yesterday. After I’d finished my free lunch and thought I should be getting home and back to work, I was going for my coat when a man came up to me and said: ‘You used to work for G**, about 25 years ago. You must have been straight out of college.’ (Bless!) ‘You were in the Computer Services department, you worked in the OR team, with Steve H*’. I stared at him, but I couldn’t place him at all. He pulled a hankie from his pocket and wiped a breadcrumb from his chin. I asked him who he worked for then. ‘I was in Marketing, across the other side of the landing.’ I muttered something about ‘Well, it’s a small world, but I have to get off now’ and scurried away.

When I was repeating the story to my daughter later, she said, ‘Wow, that’s something, that he could still recognise you after all this time!’ and I thought, yes, I suppose it is. Especially as I have no recollection of him at all. He wasn’t that unattractive, must be a few years older than me, I suppose, judging from the context in which he remembered me, but he still had hair, which is always a bonus I admit I was quite flattered by the ‘straight out of college’ line, but I guess the mere fact that someone who can only ever have known me by sight when I was in my 20s could still recognise me after all this time, well, that’s quite flattering too, when you think about it.
The other funny thing was that I was chatting with my friend Val over lunch, and also to another guy on our table, whom I didn’t know (don’t think Val knew him either). The age profile of Clerks is that, although some of the women are a bit younger, the men are almost universally retired from some other job, so they are predominantly in their 50s and 60s, but the chap on our table said, ‘Oh that’s the motorbike man over there’, and Val and I both instantly swung round to see who he was talking about. And no, it wasn’t some hunk in leathers! Oh well, we don’t get any better, do we?