Random meetings

When I worked in London during the late 1970s I had a number of random meetings with people who were in the public eye, but these encounters had nothing to do with any action on my part that might have been expected to lead to them. I did not move in exalted circles – I merely went for walks at lunchtime along the same streets that people far more famous than I also happened to be using.

I therefore had to apologise to government minister Willie Whitelaw, with whom I once collided in St James’s Park, and I spotted Michael Foot limping along on his way to an Indian restaurant. A car stopped to allow me to cross the road – the driver was David Hockney. I popped into a bookshop where Frank Muir and Dennis Norden were signing copies of one of their “My Word” books – there was nobody else there, so I had a five-minute chat with them.

In another bookshop Spike Milligan was signing books. I bought a copy of “Adolf Hitler: my part in his downfall”, which he duly signed. “You’re too kind”, I said. “Sometimes three kind”, he replied. On the way back to my place of work I passed Leon Trotsky eating a hotdog. OK – not the real Leon Trotsky but an actor having a break during filming in Carlton House Terrace.

It might sound as though these meetings all happened on the same day, but that is certainly not the case. However, it would have been quite something if all these people been together at the same time in the same place and the meetings had not been so random after all.

Michael Foot and Leon Trotsky might have got on quite well together, although the conversation could have become somewhat heated if Willie Whitelaw, a well-known supporter of Margaret Thatcher, had joined in.

Muir and Norden, who had both been in the RAF during the war, would probably have exchanged stories with former Army man Spike Milligan.

“How long were you are in the Army?” Frank might have asked. “Five foot eleven” would have been Spike’s response.

And what about David Hockney? How well would he have fitted in with the other members of this strange assemblage? He would have been the youngest one there by some margin, the only one who was gay and the only one who would have refused to do military service.

However, maybe he would have seized the opportunity to stand back and observe and perhaps he would have saved the observations for a later piece of art. It was not long after my imagined get-together that he developed the technique of making art from joined-together photographs – so perhaps he was standing to one side and imagining a “joiner” of Muir, Norden, Milligan, Whitelaw, Foot and an actor playing Trotsky?

Random meetings can lead to all sorts of consequences, whether real or just in the artist’s or writer’s imagination. Being alive to such imaginings is what counts.

© John Welford