A big shout-out to my friend Shane Sandhoefner, who a year and a half ago pulled this poem from out of his shirt pocket and read it out at my farewell meal in Cambridge. And with whom I met up again last week on a boat in Richmond. I hope to see you again soon, my cricket-loving, Bob Dylan-quoting, Shawshank Redemption-watching friend.

In the meantime, here it is- a damn fine poem on a..umm.. damn fine subject.

My Time with the The Ajay

We met in Cheltenham Spa
which seems unlikely on the face of it,
but is i suppose only as unlikely as meeting
anyplace, in a certain sense.

He tried his luck at fleeing,
but i caught up and sat right by him.
The past makes a sound much like
the gentle hiss of a heating vent.

Mondays and Fridays were the heaviest-
we renamed assets till our eyes were numb
and fiddling with the feisty pair-split,
bu by god, in the end they fit like a glove.

Parth couldn't tell my voice from his,
which presumably led them to think
it was actually me who came to visit,
me they took out to dinner.
Abdul sent me his best wishes,
and now Vaibhav thinks I'm the one going to Pearson.

The Ajay taught me cricket,
you've got to grip it and rip it-
and we did so at a local park,
where The Ajay nicknamed me Parth,
which added to the general confusion
especially for Charlie and Dawn.
So i nicknamed him Shane,
but it never quite caught on.

We all saw him at karaoke.
He sat down and was suddenly
straight from the 1970s,
almost put his arm around me
with his feet tapping along
to Lola, or some other song,
and we finally sang us some Dylan
because we're both like rolling stones.
We're always moving and spinning
downhill, we're like gravitational poems.

The world is draped and limited
in strange ways, and the words stay
just a few centimetres from
the tips of our tongues.

But we can still smile softly
at the familiar shapes,
these ever-numbered days,
and laugh thinking
that some things hang around,
like an ink stain on a thumb.