“…And he wanted me to do what? Pretend to pick his wife up! So that’s what it all boils down then. An off the wall comment thrown out by your over here, over paid and over sexed yank friend. So unsettling, so preposterous, and so damnably in your face American that you could n’t help feel that you had been let into some very exclusive club. Club Braggadocio. Club Devil may care. Club Macho. Why did n’t someone club me over the head the moment I heard Carson say it. If there’s ever a time and a place to where you can trace all your regrets to then that’s the place for me. I’ve been back to the headwaters of my despair more than once over the years. I know: you want me to explain his "request". Hang on a while, I'm getting there.

Our lives could not have been more dissimilar the moment he cooed that over ripe expression of bizarreness into my ingenue ears. I was Nineteen, fresh-faced and pudding-cheeked. A little rosebud blown in from the North that had fallen to earth in the Big City. My aura in those early days would have been green and probably visible at sea too. I was an elderly child; old, the consequence, strangely, of being young and over educated. Three years of too much reading and too many earnest, agitated late night conversations had ensured that I left Academia a weary, cynical know it all. Which, of course I was not; all I actually knew was studied responses, great for the Emma Bovarys that lived only on the printed page but beyond useless when it came to the cut and thrust of the real world. It was like being placed on a course of steroids in a way: forearms like cinder blocks whilst everything else just flapped limply in the breeze

What I was, Carson certainly was n’t: he was bold, brazen with an exuberant gift for that intoxicating phrase that would startle, but never leave the ears of any listener. A magician, really, and words were his charms, his incantations. No one ever left Carson without feeling somehow changed; for me, it was always the inevitable thunderbolt of a statement that he would let go that would roll around the inside of my mind for months. It was n’t just his boisterous, wild, fresh phrases that awed me. Somewhere in Henry V, there’s the line that “men of few words are the best”. Utterly impossible to believe in Carson's case.

There was something else and that I did n’t have too. He knew what he wanted from life and he knew too that he was going to get it. Maybe he would suffer for the first steps of the long march that he had set for himself, but he just knew that he would be swapping the hard road for the red carpet somewhere in his life. Self-assurance like his would have kept the Titanic floating if you could have bottled it.

It was n’t just temperaments that highlighted the difference between the two of us; there were our backgrounds. God himself could not have devised anything more incongruous. I was from a tough, little mining village in the heartland of industrial SouthYorkshire. Where the Pit head whistle calling the faithful to work in the early hours would wind and bend over the hills and dales. Where the rain lashed the streets almost horizontally at times. And where Men spoke hardly any words but let slip subtle, almost invisible gestures of communication by the nod of a head or raise of an eyebrow. Well, how green was Carson’s Valley? He came from the pulsing, throbbing, wise cracking heart of America, at least that’s how I saw it. Three monosyllables that even now work better than an aphrodisiac for me: New York City, as exotic as Bangkok and as alluring as Paris in this Greenhorn’s eyes.

How did we meet? As eccentrically as everything else that characterised our relationship. We were, dare I say it, grave-robbing, plundering a sacred monument. That’s the incident that catalysed it all, but some background first. We wandered into each other in the Lake District. I was on a week’s hiking holiday with a few friends. He, on the other hand, was on a solo European Grand Tour; one, though, with pattern to it. An English Lit graduate, his objective was to see as many of the literary places of worship, as he termed them, as could be slotted away in three weeks. If its Monday, then it must be Baudelaire; if its Tuesday, then it must be Rimbaud, it was that kind of tour. So, karma, kismet, fate, or whatever name you want to give to that spiritual centrifugal force that pushes the unlikeliest of individuals together was whirring away industriously in the background pushing closer and closer two very disparate individuals. And then it happened, the big encounter. Odd, but I can’t actually remember where exactly it happened, let alone the how. Maybe it was near Cockermouth. I only say that since I knew Carson could n’t stop chortling every time that particular place name came up. Nor would he stop repeating a conversation he had as a hitcher with a lorry driver about gobbling turkeys. He liked to bang his funny bone on those two.

Carson, I now realise, either did not consciously recognise boundaries, or saw them only as something to be climbed over. And that’s how the two of us joined a very, very exclusive fraternity. We became grave robbers. Not, I suppose the preferred career path for many impressionable seventeen-year-olds. Incidents never happen randomly. They may seem to do but they don’t. There is a ragbag of things that set the conditions for something to happen. What it took for this gintrap to be triggered was a cocksure young American with a younger starry eyed, easily led Brit bouncing along in his slipstream. The morning after the night before we had decided to pair up and do a little sightseeing. Whilst I had a motive: I wanted to catch a few more of his pungent comments, recycle them and pass them of as my own. He probably wanted someone just to pass the day with.