THE STERLING HAMLET

I once knew a Terry with a ring like this, and the ring is relevant to why I don’t any more. Terry was staying at a mutual friend’s flat on Bouchier Street whilst he was away, but the mutual wasn’t much of a communicator — less still for being on a different time zone — and Terry didn’t know that he’d already entrusted the spare key to another friend, Jamie, to water the plants and so on. Terry began to suspect he was being haunted, his conscience heavy from having just had the family Irish Water Spaniel put down for dementia — he was back in London for the funeral — and Jamie and I made the very most of it. We left a nice chewy bone in his pillowcase one night, rented and left the movie Beethoven playing on the Sky TV when he got in on another, and hovered a remote-controlled helicopter with a picture of the dog celotaped to its undercarriage just over his sleeping face on another. This last exploit was apparently too much. He went ballistic, punching Jamie so hard that the reverse of the T — the same as the non-reverse, the font used in his ring not being a gothic, like ours — was impressed in his cheek for weeks. Jamie’s a teacher, and to this day is known to his students as Jamie T, though most of the new generation doesn’t know why. 

Of course I’m not making it up. Why would I make it up? And how could I if I wanted to? I’m not Shakespeare.