• Sally Harrington, with whom I worked long years ago at the animation house TVC London ( Yellow Submarine, The Snowman ) , and who now leads a life apparently co-scripted by Stella Gibbons and Flann O’Brien in the twilit West of Ireland…
  Being secretly Irish, she's got the gift of the gab, and has recently defeated eight lightly oiled contemporaries in a slanging match, making her a Merciless Put Down Black Belt..
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Cameron Platt, a peripatetic observer of all things exotic, who drifts elegantly between the Amazon basin  and South East Asia, wide-eyed , open-mouthed and  inhaling vigorously. Not only is that One Man Band down in Llama Land an old chum, but he’s seen the inside of that Bar in Far Bombay…..not to mention that sampan in Koh Pannyi….
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Rab Ballantyne, originally from Scotland and in at the start ( he it was who came up with their name ) of the Average White Band, now retired from the Diplomatic service and living in Brazil. His stories from the world of music are fascinating... the only musicians he doesn't know in that business, it seems, are probably still busking..and he could write a book on his Foreign Office career.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Hugh Vaughan Williams, who I met in Capetown in the sixties and who was a sub-editor at the London Evening Standard under Simon Jenkins, went on to become the Sydney editor of the Readers Digest. He has now retired from journalism and lives with his family in Virginia, U.S.A, perfectly positioned to comment on antiques and the Race for the White House.

and maybe even

 

• Zoran Janjetov in Novi Sad, Serbia, in the former Yugoslavia, who is a great comics artist working with the extraordinary writer/ filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky in Paris, and is the best friend of the late, great Mitar Subotic ( Suba ) who ensured that Zoran became a music aficionado of the most exacting kind. Rather less predictably, he is also an acknowledged expert on genre TV and movies of the Sixties.