My family and other animals

WH has a weirdo friend, well I thought he was weird but I find now he's actually quite normal for a weirdo. I first met Friend on Valentine's day about 4 years ago. I had been summoned to London for the big day and ended up staying in the facility in which WH was working at the time. Romantic? Not. Unless you happen to think that sharing the evening with 200 assorted German and Dutch students who set off fire alarms twice during the night, necessitating full scale evacuations of the building and standing on London pavements half clad at 2 am and 3 am is your idea of heaven. Anyway I digress.

Earlier in the evening we had been for a meal in a Greek restaurant. Unusually we had both been drinking wine, me rather more than my WH. Returning to our accomodation WH went into the lounge and was met by what looked like a tramp. He was about 60, with long straggly hair and grey dread-locks. He was smoking 'rollies' and WH cadged one which I though was a bit rich as the tramp didn't seem to have two halfpennies to rub together. I was introduced. Friend was very well spoken and extremely polite. The wine was having an efect and I thought afterwards I had imagined all this. After a few minutes of chat we left to go to bed.

WH has kept in touch with Friend over the years and they meet up when WH is working in the capital. I have come to know him too and to ponder what circumstances encouraged an extremely clever and well-off chap to leave his home and job and become a traveller. In the last 12 months he has ventured further afield in his shiny new estate car and we have phone calls and postcards from such places as Southern Spain, Budapest and Switzerland. When he first got the car he had not driven for 25 years. He went to Lands End to see what it was like, then followed that by a short trip to John O' Groats. When he got to Prague he thought he had got the hang of driving again.

An accomplished watercolour artist, he is now painting his way round the South West. Tonight he comes for dinner, will regale us as he does, with his latest exploits and have deep discussions of metaphysics and pure maths which even have me reeling and I did maths as part of my degree. It is at that point that I will retire gracefully and leave the 'boys' to their bonding and early morning talk of the meaning of life. Eventually Friend will take off in his jalopy and disappear into the mist only to return when he feels like company once more.