​FRIDAY NIGHT

INSIGHT

13.xi.2026

I was in the same class at grammar school as Ian Addison. His ears stuck out and he walked as if on springs.  He was brilliant at French until they started bringing poetry and prose chunks into it. Flights of fancy he regarded as bull. He happened to have a knack for remembering vocabulary, it seemed. 

 

He was a good  talker of English, anyway, and rather ironical. He would say in a posh voice, ‘I am a professor of the English shlanguage.’

 

He came on his bike to visit one hot Saturday, through the streets of the estate which to him must have resembled a camp of hostile Indians. He mentioned that someone had casually thrown a stone at him. He left his bike in the back garden and we went down to the riverbank. You never knew what might happen there. It could have been some patch of ground Gulliver discovered. Ian Addison fitted right in, I must say.

 

I found out later that at the first job he held after school he was in an office with several women. He asked each one out, working his way through, and by some devilish plan they had worked out, each one agreed to meet—and then stood him up. Addison, the poor idiot, didn’t get what was happening. That was not very charming of the girls, we all agreed.

 

One year when I was delivering mail as a student in the Christmas holidays I bumped into Addison and borrowed two half-crowns off him. The debt was never repaid because I haven’t run into him since. It would be great to see him again if he should see this. With interest, that five bob should amount to a good couple of quid.