Travel Reference
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You, ya numpty. (disparagingly:) Robin fuckin Genius.
Robin who?
Oh, don't start again.
What's he on, anyway?
The same as us. (sound of bottle being tapped)
I was afraid of that.
You guys are starting to talk shite. I'd better open another bottle and pour us all a drink.
We're starting to -?
Ssh! Let the man concentrate.
… anyway, he's been rubbish since he went to Hollywood.
In a way I'd like to report that we spent most evenings engaged in deep discussions about
the Iraqi War (Part Deux), its provenance, course, likely repercussions and mooted se-
quels, but by this time there's little left to say. The war is as good as won, we're told, with
just some mopping up to be done while the search goes on for those fiendishly well-hid-
den WMDs.
The three of us know each other so well there's not much chance any one of us going
to surprise the other two by saying something like, 'Oh no, I was all for the war.' All
there's been are a few, brief, bitter exchanges confirming we each despise the illegitimate,
warmongering scumbag bastard who's in ultimate charge of our armed forces, and that
we don't have a lot of time for Tony Blair either.
We play Dave's game instead, where the takings and the victories are bloodless, and
where, as in most games, there are no civilians.
McCartney: the case for madness .
It took us years to convince Dave he was crazy. Even the driving under the truck thing
didn't count according to him. To this day he claims that driving underneath a 40-tonne
truck in a tiny little Fiat X1/9 sports car just to avoid having to abandon an overtaking
manoeuvre halfway through was an entirely sensible thing to do. I could rest my case
there, but McCartney won't let me.
The Fiat X1/9 - the baby Ferrari as it was called at the time - was a beautifully bal-
anced if rather underpowered little car with a targa top you could take off and stow in
the boot. Dave foolishly let me have a shot of the car one night in darkest Fleet Street, in
the old days when they still printed papers there; I had a great time whizzing through the
narrow streets, dodging giant lorries loaded with ten-tonne rolls of newsprint.
Dave was driving the car in north London one bright, sunny day in the early eighties,
behind a big articulated truck. He started to overtake, then - when he was about midway
along the side of the artic - saw a traffic island ahead blocking his route. Now, he had the
top off, so he could see that from the top of the Fiat's A-pillar - in other words the top of
the windscreen - to the bottom of the truck's platform there was a gap of a few inches,
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