ON MAKING AN EXIT ~ 1 April 2026

From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s I made a sort of a living as a freelance feature writer for newspapers and magazines. In 1993 I started writing travel features for the Sunday Times. I knew a lot about travel and nothing at all about writing travel features. I was saved from disaster by having as my editor the legendary Christine Walker. Her generosity and forbearance allowed me to learn on the job.

I knew I was lucky but I did not fully appreciate just how lucky. The Sunday Times paid a pound a word ~ the equivalent of £2.50 in 2026 money ~ and Christine never complained when I delivered an extra hundred on top of the word count we had agreed. Furthermore she paid on delivery, not on publication. She also paid me for photographs and, to my astonishment, from time to time a cheque for a couple of hundred pounds would arrive in the post for features that had been syndicated to other Murdock papers. I was, it seemed, biggish in Australia and for the first time in my life I was in danger of earning my living from writing.

After the Sunday Times moved to Wapping, Christine commissioned us freelancers from the bar at the Groucho Club. I worried about her bar bills but she explained that the advertising in the travel section made more money for the paper than the advertising revenue from all the other sections put together and that as a consequence no one in accounts at Wapping saw fit to questioned her expenses.

One early evening Ned Sherrin who was passing our table, missed his footing and without warning or introduction plumped down in the chair facing mine. It was clear that he was ever so slightly pissed. He was dressed in a moss-green velvet suit with a frilly fronted off-white shirt and a matching moss-green floppy bow tie. He looked like a threadbare but generously overstuffed sofa. Close up his face was puffy with the texture of suet pastry. Pogo the Pillsbury Doughboy only not so cute.

I had only just arrived and so my drink - a large Tanqueray with a small bottle of tonic - stood before me on the table, untouched. Sherrin looked at me and then at Christine Walker and then picked up my glass and drained the neat gin in a single gulp. The action of slamming the empty glass on the table seemed to release a spring in the seat of his chair and he bounced to his feet, thanked us with a imperious wave of his hand and continued on his journey towards the front door. By now the whole bar had gone quiet. From the corner by the window a voice was heard to say

“ Ohh for fucks sake. Where on earth does she think she’s going in that get-up?”

As he approached the door Sherrin must have noticed the silence in the room, felt the palpable atmosphere of expectation, realised that he “had the audience” and felt that he owed it to them (and to his art) to “make an exit”. In slow motion he raised one hand high above his head like a highland dancer and finding he had hit his mark by the door exactly and on cue, described a one-hundred and eighty degree pirouette. As his upper body completed its half circle he discovered that inexplicably one of his feet was now on back-to front. His upper body continued to revolve while his feet remained on opposite-lock and rooted in place. Now he found that his legs were tied in a knot of such Gordian tightness and complexity that it was doubtful if even a rear-Admiral’s marlinspike, a tool that Sherrin was skilled at manipulating, could have penetrated it. He fell to the floor.

Most of the people in the room were too drunk to stand, nevertheless they all leapt to their feet as one, threw up their hands in appreciation and with a single voice roared “ENCORE”