THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME?

Yesterday, I had the very real pleasure of a most convivial lunch with two good friends. For years, the three of us worked together in varying capacities, throughout which time we developed a friendship as well as a working relationship. We`re all retired now from the slings and arrows of that former life and we have each found our own way of coming to terms with a different sort of life, away from the career-driven compulsion of permanent employment.

By and large, we are pretty fit and we keep in touch and every three or four months we meet up for lunch and compare notes. It`s a pleasant thing to do and although we are the same people, our respective roles in life these days are very different to what they were when we worked together. Yesterday, however, perhaps for the first time, there were just hints of fleeting moments when it seemed that we might be beginning to settle in to the kind of people we might become as the years continue to pass.

I found it difficult to escape the notion that the three of us might, after all, be slipping unknowingly but inevitably into our own Last of the Summer Whine. The stage is set, the conditions are right, the cast in in place. All we have to do now is decide which of us is Clegg, which is Compo and which is Foggy.