This is where my friend and former partner in shenanigans and all sorts of derring do now resides. In a small graveyard just outside a quintessentially Cotswold, English Chocolate Box, Twee with overpriced cheesemongers and coffee shops with ideas well above their station.

“Bloody tourists don’t they know theres a pandemic on, that’ll be £3.50 please” as I made a note to choke on my coffee once I have left the shop; blessed are the cheesemongers. The public toilets are out of use for now, and so found a slightly overgrown footpath to relieve myself before decamping to the graveyard to see my old mate, well his decomposed remains marked with a rather splendid tombstone, his name and the dates, no pithy comment, he was only 28 and theres nothing pithy about that.

My friend from near London turned up and we chewed the fat from a distance, sat like strangers passing time waiting for a bus that would never come to the leafy end of the secluded Cotswold graveyard. Were we mourning the loss of our friend those 21 years ago in tragic circumstances in India, dead right we were. But not in a church, on a bench with home made cheese and ham sandwiches heavy on the salad cream and a large can of cloudy Brewdog, with the sun on our faces dappling through the silver birches.

To me this seems like a little victory for common sense in a world ruled by mentalists whom my good friend would have been truly enraged with.

Cheers Stef.