than I remembered.
I said: I don’t mind the empty chair.
I said it as a joke and the room laughed and then went soft, the way rooms do.
I don’t mind the empty chair.
Four years later he was sitting in a car park at Brackley Cross at half past ten at night, and the reason he could not ring me was that I had told three hundred people I did not mind.
He told me afterwards it was the proudest he had ever been in his life.
He has since told me that it was also the most frightened he has ever been, and that he did not understand why until the March.
Because I had stood up in front of three hundred people and described him. And he had spent the eleven months after that Saturday trying to work out how to tell me that the description
