The bits and pieces gathered randomly on this digital hard shoulder make for a self-indulgent scrap book. It’s a way of tidying scattered thoughts, half-finished ideas and fleeting remembrances before the waste paper bin, interruptions and memory lapse steal them away.

The following three people were stolen away, two especially early. In each case, ominous news was shared which meant there was time to say something. Proper goodbyes should be about the goodby-ee, not the goodby-er. My attempts fail on that score. There are family and personal in-jokes. These remarkable, and very different, individuals had a profoundly positive influence on my life and my family’s. I still owe them immense thanks.

                                     11 West Lodge Avenue,

                                          LONDON W3 9SE

5^th March 2010

Dear Uncle Phil,

Word reaches us that the situation in Headington is not entirely as it might be.  Irksome, horrible events that sound ridiculously unwelcome.

Obviously we’ve written to our MP about this.  It’s about time he stopped worrying whether trams should be allowed through Acton and started concerning himself with proper issues.  Similarly, we have lodged an appeal with the Lords.  After a bit of flummery, it has leapfrogged the queue, leaving Douglas Hogg’s moat and Sir Peter Vigger’s duck pond trailing in its wake.  I believe it’s even knocked Brussels’ 22,000-word treatise on the banana – a reality I discovered three weeks ago – into touch.  A weighty subject indeed.  

Pa relayed the news as he caught me returning from four days in Istanbul.  I was locked up in a company meeting.  At least the view from the taxi to and from the airport suggested it was Istanbul. It could very well very have been a car park in Grimsby for all we saw of it, stuck in a very large room for 12 hours a day, 350 of us mouldering in serried ranks.  The great and the good of Ogilvy from across the world pronounced and postured, sometimes well, oftentimes with the charisma of a whelk.  Not all bad though.  At one stage, I was co-opted to be part of a group and attend a ‘Story-telling seminar’.  The charismatic chap who led it steered us to a mythologised piece of Hemingway law – that it’s perfectly possible to tell a story in six words.  (When challenged by some questing tourist in an Everglades bar, the writer paused for thought and wrote on a napkin: “For sale.  Baby shoes. Never worn.”) We were invited to try our hand at the exercise, writing a story ourselves in just six words. I particularly admired the Australian in front of me for his suggestion on the brief. “Convent life. Worth the sex change.”

I’d love to track down that French exchange boy Nicholas, who you hosted as a family the year we all piled down to Rock in Cornwall.  He made crepes to a precise recipe and hoarded digestive biscuits.  I suspect his six-word story might well read, “Philip. Don’t be so rude. Again.”

Yesterday evening, the jazz quartet that I have been drumming with for thirty years played in a basement club in Chelsea called the 606.  It’s a pretty ramshackle joint in a smart address. 120 people packed in to watch me clattering away, much like someone washing up, while the pianist, saxophonist and bassist did their best to hide my lapses. All in all, I think we got away with it. It was fun and nothing if not self-indulgent.  We’re getting ever so slightly better, but it doesn’t do to rush these things. In another sixty or seventy years, we’ll be ready to attempt some Miles Davis. 

Setting up earlier at the tail end of the afternoon, I was ambushed by a phone call from our American PR people at the office.  “We’d like,” they said carefully, “for you to meet the prime minister of Kazakhstan.  Tomorrow.  At 8am.  He’s in London and he wants an advertising campaign to promote his country to foreign investors.” 

I know absolutely nothing about Kazakhstan.

It was one of those anxious moments that can really upset a man’s paradiddles.  When I relayed this to the other three in the band, Phil, the pianist, looked across the empty tables of the club and said, mockingly, out loud’” Is there anybody in from Kazakhstan?”   At which point the solitary waitress, laying up tables, turned round and said, “I am.”  Extraordinary.  She’s here doing an economics doctorate at UCL and making pin money in the evenings.  I was able with her to sit and learn all about her country in between tapping out various jazz standards. In the end, the Kazakh administration postponed the meeting as their PM became bogged down in steering committee nonsense through the night. A shame, as I was all set to regale him with my knowledge of apple yields and tractor production.  I think we might be on for next week. Advertising is a funny old game.

All this is merely a prelude to say I saw something yesterday and was reminded of you.  In the gentlemen’s loo of the 606, there is a functional and rather Teutonic-looking vending machine of the kind one finds in those sorts of places.  I vaguely recall that you and Aunt Sue were once in not un-close proximity to a similar device in Germany, when a machine malfunction served to deliver torrents of prophylactics onto your shoes.  It was a story that stuck with me for some reason.  When all those copycat books followed Peter Mayle’s ‘A Year In Provence’, they sported titles such as ‘Driving Over Bitter Lemons’, ‘Baskets of Olives’ or ‘Orange Blossom In Andalusia”.  I think one splendid addition to the cannon would be “A Surfeit Of Dickies”, a dryly-amusing account of Philip and Sue’s tussles with sauerkraut, bratwurst and 1950’s German reconstruction.

I should imagine, currently, there are plenty of moments when the serious floods in, so I hope the frivolous makes it too.  Not that epic subjects are entirely absent in W3.  A couple of weeks ago, Alice was walking with Clare to school as they passed a local Church.  At which point Alice, with all the gravity a nine-year-old can muster, peered over her glasses and said, “Mum, what’s constipated ground?” 

She has an interesting take on the world, shot through with weapons-grade confidence.  I’m not quite the archivist my father is, busy as he is building up a legacy several feet high of A4 paper.  However, I did write down one exchange between her and I a little while ago. 

Me:  ‘Did you sleep well, Alice?’

Alice: ‘Yes, thank you.’

Me: ‘Did you have nice dreams?’

Alice: ‘I had one scary one. There were these nuns in short skirts. They were chasing us and when one of them bit me, I had to fake my own death.  Apart from that, it was fine.’

In film terms, I think we’re talking a picture with something for everyone.

We’re all set about with Italians, including Joss’ godfather Ciccio, who have come for a weekend and to see a Wasps rugby game against Gloucester.  There are three of them, jolly and entertaining – if bibulous – chums from our stomping ground in Belluno. After careful deliberation, they have decided slavish support for their national side has to be subdivided in order to see any return on investment.  They now follow the black and yellow striped team with assiduous, distant passion. The match we’re off to see is to be played on the team’s ground just below Wycombe General Hospital. Despite this, the Club describes itself as ‘London Wasps’. The same, geographically louche thinking that makes Birmingham ‘London’s Third Airport’ or any of our better cricket players genuinely native.

There is an awful lot of thought of the most positive and concerned kind heading your way from this address.  Clare, Joss, Alice and I have been packing up good will bombs with love and cotton wadding and launching them down the M40 in a concerted, clustered attack. Slightly homemade, but we are working hard on their effectiveness.  All part of the war effort.

If any of the preceding is misplaced (a nasty tendency towards the facetious on my part but I am having counselling for it), please forgive me. 

In the middle of all this, by the way, I have absolutely no doubt Aunt Sue’s hair is looking utterly, totally fabulous.

With very much love,

Will

                                     11 West Lodge Avenue,

                                          LONDON W3 9SE

10 June, 2015

Dear Jeff,

I should imagine a number of messages are flying in your direction just now – and rightly so.  Andrew Mitchell has been bashing the jungle drums with his typical, regimental sergeant-major vigour.  Your news went from him to Andrew Hawkins and then here.

Bastard set of events and all that.  I doubt you want any hand wringers crowding round but then you never did.  Just to let you know that top quality wishes are heading your way.  I should imagine that if anybody’s taking to the shit fight with brutal honesty, it’s the Jeff Quilter I remember.

It’s a little while ago, but I owe you a very great deal.  Sitting down opposite you in July 1983 and for a couple of years after that, I learned an awful lot about this funny trade.  You took a wet-behind-the-ears posh boy and, not without extraordinary kindness, whipped some sense into me.  I learned how to get things done.  Whether it was dealing with Chubby, Barry, Janet and the rest of the McCormick’s traffic department, or hoping to slot some work into Gerry’s creative department, you showed me the real ropes of how to get it done:  you’re the bloke who actually made it happen. 

I particularly remember you telling the story of staying at some very smart house for the weekend and desperately trying to find secret, hidden away places in which to fart, the result of ridiculously rich food.  As you told it, you’d give your glasses that trademark little hitch up your nose and scratch that beard.   And you made it very, very funny.  One of those Duke-of-York, can-of-Swan (or ‘black duck’) deliveries.

That you happened to do it immaculately turned out, with perfect hair, a permanent grin, a string of elegant expletives and a hint of a growl made it more than memorable.  You are an indelible memory of why it’s the people who make advertising interesting.  With Alison, who I remember vividly as the loveliest of people, you made up a real glamour couple and still do. 

I think we bumped into each other after the Nutford Place years.  I’m not entirely sure when and where, but my path since was set during my exit from McCormick’s.  Again, you were instrumental in making that a positive – chucking the odd brief at the squit in the creative department who was trying to prove he wasn’t just a suit with aspirations.  You bolstered me in a couple of plain speaking speeches, both barrels, just-get-out-there-and-fucking-do-it type stuff.  It worked.  It was only on careful reflection that, behind the Quilter barrage, there was a huge amount of consideration, affection and respect for the people you were helping.   Class act.

I’ve knocked about a bit since then – BBH for a long while, one or two other agencies, a reasonable stint at O&M and now a sideways move to a little branding and design outfit called Big Fish. It’s fun and good to be off the aircraft carrier of big agency malarkey (I was even made Managing Director at Ogilvy for a couple of years. A bizarre gardening accident of a decision.)  I see Gerry Moira and am in a pools syndicate with Julian Sandy, Andrew Hawkins, Mark Harvey, Chris Ward, Pete Watkins, Mike Brugman.  We keep loosely in touch, despite not having won a bean in over 30 years. Home is West London, with a couple of teenage kids and an other half who works in the film business.

From what Andrew says, you’re being very straightforward about matters.  It sounds like the family is all around you.   I have absolutely no doubt there is an abundance of love and respect in the air, to which I’d like to add mine.  You are a brilliant bloke.

With great affection,

Will xx

­                                    11 West Lodge Avenue,

                                          London W3 9SE

21^st May, 2017

Dear Simon (and Antonia),

Tricky news has reached us, as it has the whole Caldicott family, about Simon’s health.  It’s a bugger. 

From various people, most recently at a Harrow cricket match yesterday, we’ve learned that you’ve gone to ground in West Wittering.   Very understandable.  Obviously, we send every possible good wish and more in your Kent direction.   I have visions of Simon with a straight bat, fending off this most horribly complicated of Googlies, with stoic good humour and a level gaze.

We should have been in touch sooner.  There is so much still to thank you for, both now and always.  Joss is on the cusp of taking A Levels.  He’s head of house at Moreton’s, Harrow, still cricketing and appears to be a reasonably level-headed 18-year-old thanks, in colossal part, to his time at prep school.  You both bear an awful lot of responsibility for that.   The ‘PID’ values you instilled – probity, integrity, decency – definitely took root.  That Joss is also refreshingly good humoured (currently with an insatiable interest in pubs) and without pious sanctimony is again testament to a more impish side of Farnham Royal life.  I’m very glad we saw that side too in the Mr & Mrs Doggart we managed to snare to dinner. Lamentably, it was only once, given that you lavished us with such warm, family hospitality.

You scooped up a sobbing Clare in the first few days of dropping Joss off with practised ease.   No matter who you were talking to, your name recognition and ability to source exactly the right comment, story or encouraging remark precisely when required remains legendary.  Bumping into you at Lord’s or around the school, you have always had that brilliant, almost to the point of being maddening, ability to leave either us or whoever it is or was feeling better, buoyed up or just simply reassured.  A fabulous skill and you make it look effortless.

Simon, you are the best of men, married to the best of women and the really smart thing is that you know that, but you never, ever let on.  A class act with a fabulous family.  

We couldn’t have been luckier in finding the Doggarts.  In your final address to Joss and his year at his leaving chapel service, you peered sternly at the boys and told them, among other things, to write a proper thank you letter.  To state the bleedin’ obvious, this one has been a sight too long in coming.

Much, much love,

Will