Today started badly. I had set out bright eyed and bushy tailed for the SOAS-IFCELS end of term party, but half-way across the pedestrian crossing between Holborn tube station and Sainbury’s, a dexterous pickpocket opened my shoulder bag, unzipped the inner compartment, and lifted my wallet. Happy Christmas, Jonathan! Sans money, sans credit cards, sans identity… The police were sympathetic (and immensely quick), but it meant that instead of polishing off various university administrative bits and pieces, I spent most of the afternoon phoning round banks and credit card companies cancelling everything. Anyone who’s been there knows what it’s like!
I then retired to bed for an hour, feeling lower than low, before heading off to the Guardian’s Obituaries’ Christmas Party, a suitably jolly do, where one met not just the editors who one deals with over the phone or by email, but fellow contributors, too. Former colleagues, like John Palmer and Kaye Whiteman (both of whom I knew in Brussels), as well as the old China hand, John Gittings, the poet Alan Brownjohn, and the writer Katherine Whitehorn (whose Cooking in a Bed-Sit is due to be updated, incorporating micro-waves). All of us there tonight pronounce judgements on others’ remarkable lives. And the daily travails suddenly seem trivial in comparison.
