Friday afternoon five or six of us meet regularly for a few beers and conversation. Six very disparate characters, aged from forty two to sixty five but all fond of good pint of well kept English ale.

After initial insults and greetings have been made and the pattern for the round established the conversation ambles along with a few pleasantries and then, we talk at each other, over each other, in earnest with each other, with concern one on one, or we listen before  mocking, confessing, denying, avoiding, enjoying, challenging or enquiring.

And so it goes: pogroms beyond the pale, patent rights for pharmaceuticals, Arsenal vs Barcelona, the Six Nations and the Heineken Cup, the price of fuel, netsuke with amber eyes, and Sebag’s ‘Jerusalem’, oak framed buildings, the strain of the herd being tested for tuberculosis, the number of dead frogs after the artic winter, Rilke’s letters, USAF losses in WW2, Audis, Bond movies, Katyn forest, Beria, Afghansitan, Egypt, the University at Delft, torn rotator cuffs, tweeting and davenports, Richelieu or Talleyrand, train journeys in South America, Lorca’s grave, sucking it in when you walk up the beach in Barbados, callipygian ladies, and tattoos lubricated by successive pints …… rambling, bumbling, stumbling for words, cracking into abuse and laughter at some stupid aside or new joke, dwindling at pee breaks or buying the next round.

We have been meeting for some years on and off and apart from the two who are wedded to their land, we are a peripatetic lot having lived and worked on all five continents, married, divorced, ups and downs, doubts and fears, but like homing pigeons always coming back to same part of England and the land know as home.

Six pints in 1985, 1975 I really can’t remember? Six pints today at £3.20 equals £19.20 x 6 rounds, is that a high price for an afternoon talking bollocks? For that’s what we call it and always have done. ‘I’m just going down the pub to talk bollocks with my mates.’

You can’t put a price on it because you cannot measure the pleasure, the psychological well being or that sense of easy familiarity and belonging. You can’t determine the educational content or the delight of learning or informing, the latter always with that edge of satisfaction of airing your knowledge, of bamboozling your mates of challenging or being challenged with the ultimate interjection,

‘What a load of bollocks.’