We left Exeter at about 3:30 pm. Our good friend Alyson Diffey took us to St David's railway station to catch our train which, as is usual even after the so-called benefits of rail privatisation was late. As we settled into our singularly uncomfortable seats we pondered on what the journey ahead would bring. For both of us it was potentially at least a great watershed in our lives. For Graham it was the first time that he had ever been outside Europe, and only the second time that he had ever left England. For me, although I had travelled widely as a child and young man it was my first time back in the tropics for the best part of twenty years; it was a homecoming of sorts and like all homecomings it was one which the unwary traveller looked forward to with a certain amount of trepidation.
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I have never made any secret of the fact that I have been undergoing treatment for a depressive illness for many years. I visit a psychiatrist on a weekly basis and I had spent several of our fifty minute sessions discussing my hopes and fears for the forthcoming journey. As it happened, most of my fears were completely groundless, as most fears usually are, but having been away from hot climates for nearly two decades I was quite worried about the effect that tropical heat would have upon a body which in the years since I last visited Hong Kong has ingested far too many cigarettes, and far too much alcohol and food for its own good.
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The seats on the train itself were uncomfortable enough, and the bloke sitting opposite me was reading one of the tackier of the UK tabloid newspapers which proclaimed (on its front page no less) the story of a hapless traveller who had been deemed too large to be allowed onto a transatlantic air flight. This served to inflame my paranoia again to an unacceptable degree, and by the time we arrived at Reading Station in order to catch the 'courtesy coach' (a particularly inappropriate name, considering that it was an hour late and the driver was both rude and uninformative) to Heathrow Airport, I was in a state of considerable paranoia for which there only seemed to be one sensible cure - alcohol!We eventually arrived at a cheap, comfortable and singularly unimpressive motel on the outskirts of the Heathrow complex where we were to meet the camera crew. When we arrived they were nowhere to be seen, and so Graham and I showered, made ourselves reasonably personable and retired to the bar to await their arrival. Then happened one of the quasi fortean coincidences that seem to occur more often within the fields of cryptoinvestigative methodology than to those mortals who do normal jobs for a living. We were sitting, drinking beer, at a small round table a few yards from the bar when I heard a vaguely familiar voice. I turned around, and there - admittedly looking somewhat older but eminently recognisable was someone whom I hadn't seen since I was a young boy in Hong Kong. I went over and introduced (or should that be re-introduced) myself, and when he had got over his obvious surprise that the seven year old schoolboy in shorts had turned into a bearded giant of 20 something stone, he and his wife joined Graham and me at our table. We had a long and animated conversation about things about which Graham neither knew or cared but the good fellow took it all in good part and we passed a very convivial couple of hours.
There was still no sign of the camera crew.
Quite a lot of beer, a large meal and a bottle of undrinkable 'wine' (which tasted like a cross between pickled onion vinegar and sherbet) later we were a little bit sozzled and there was no sign of our soon-to-be travelling companions. By midnight, as we were just about to retire to our separate beds (the bar having closed and the facilities for amusement offered by the hotel being somewhat limited) we heard the unmistakable sounds of a party of guests arriving at the hotel and attempting to get some sense out of the slightly retarded night porter.
Staggering around from the conservatory in which we had been drinking, talking and generally wasting an evening we discovered that it was indeed the three members of our team that we had been eagerly awaiting, and we immediately offered our skills as beasts of burden and helped them unload their hire car. We offered to buy them a drink but they said, quite rightly as it turned out, that there would be plenty of time for that in the weeks to come and that having finished filming in the North of England at tea time, and then having driven all the way to London, and then with an early start the next morning, the most sensible thing to do would be to get a relatively early night.
As it was now past midnight and Graham and I had made a valiant attempt to drink the bar dry, the concept of an 'early night' seemed a somewhat flexible one, but we reluctantly concurred, and therefore in the words of the immortal Samuel Pepys ... so to bed.
