DABlog

Now this was fun.

In London, the past Wednesday evening, I had dinner with two old friends: writer and critic Nicolette Jones and literature scholar-turned-banker Gurdon Wattles.

I met Nicolette in 1981, when I was a senior at Yale and she had come over to do a year at Yale as part of her graduate work in English at Oxford. So we’ve known each other for about 25 years. Nicolette and her family are among the friends I spend the most time with in London; indeed, I’ve spent more time with them over the years than with any number of my friends who live in, say, New York, less than fifty miles from me.

Gurdon I’ve known for forty years. We met when we were seven. My family was living in Cambridge, England, for several months, and I was going to school there. Gurdon and I became best mates at school. Over the years we’ve seen each other, either with our families or on our own, only three or four times, the most recent being in 1988. It’s only in the past few weeks that we’d been back in touch at all.

Here’s the funny thing, though: Nicolette and Gurdon, quite independently of me, have been good friends since their university days back in the late seventies or so. How did we figure out that we all knew each other? It was back in 1982, in the Spring of the year that Nicolette spent at Yale. She and I were sitting across from each other at a table in a student dining hall, and she was writing a postcard. Postcards are fair game, right? So I glanced at it, and saw that it was addressed to my old friend from Cambridge, Gurdon Wattles. That broke the ice, you may be sure.

Now it’s 2006, and the three of us were together in one place for the first time. And it was really fun. A long time in the making, and an absolute delight. More of the same to follow, I hope!