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But on Saturday we (SWMBO, The Boy, and I) had taken him to Oxfordshire to see Juan, Janet, and the kids; and Kenton and Susan, who had driven from farthest Gloucestershire.
The old School Bridge team are now all fifty. And we look it too. We compared aches and knee problems overmuch, I fear, for Madame, who, being youngest of the adults there present, still clings on to some vain belief that she is as fit as she's ever been. Long may she continue in that: I'm sure thinking such keeps a person young. Nevertheless, we four four-No-Trumpers (various forms of a convention known as Blackwood - first-round control asking and slam seeking) were all aware that age had crept upon us stealthily, rather than in the Assyrian fashion, as the poet Byron would have it.
A mathmo Academic, a company director, a madman, and an ex-guitarist: and of us all, Felix is the least successful - something one would not have put money on when we were all still at school.
It is so difficult to describe how Felix was to someone who has, like Juan's kids for example, only seen him in his present incarnation.
At seventeen his guitar playing looked fit to be the glory of the world. Agile of mind as well as clever, his imagination was unconfined by genre or medium. He was a very good mathematician, an athletic team member, a brilliant bridge partner, and so charismatic as to make folk like me both envious and slightly awestruck.
Maybe there is some other quantum-contingent reality where he held it all together: I wish though, that it had been this one.
The old School Bridge team are now all fifty. And we look it too. We compared aches and knee problems overmuch, I fear, for Madame, who, being youngest of the adults there present, still clings on to some vain belief that she is as fit as she's ever been. Long may she continue in that: I'm sure thinking such keeps a person young. Nevertheless, we four four-No-Trumpers (various forms of a convention known as Blackwood - first-round control asking and slam seeking) were all aware that age had crept upon us stealthily, rather than in the Assyrian fashion, as the poet Byron would have it.
A mathmo Academic, a company director, a madman, and an ex-guitarist: and of us all, Felix is the least successful - something one would not have put money on when we were all still at school.
It is so difficult to describe how Felix was to someone who has, like Juan's kids for example, only seen him in his present incarnation.
At seventeen his guitar playing looked fit to be the glory of the world. Agile of mind as well as clever, his imagination was unconfined by genre or medium. He was a very good mathematician, an athletic team member, a brilliant bridge partner, and so charismatic as to make folk like me both envious and slightly awestruck.
Maybe there is some other quantum-contingent reality where he held it all together: I wish though, that it had been this one.
