Robert the Westie. My life. By me.

5. Life at the office and a passage through puberty.

Well, London life and Basingstoke life had, on reflection, very little in common. One was a kind of soap opera centred on an anonymous location. The other proved to be a documentary on those who live and work in one of the most famous cities on the planet. Yes, to echo the words of that most greedy breed of humanity, namely estate agents, location was indeed pivotal.

Where my life had been all smells, food and family conflicts, now it was deeply enriched with the arts, politics, economics and business. Mainly, of course, this was down to Steve. He had a habit that he found illuminating, but that I found annoying. Every Sunday, without fail, he would vary my morning walk so that we could drop in on the local newsagent. There he would acquire a stack of newspapers. Back in the apartment, I lost him for the next three or four hours. I might as well have died for all the attention I got during his immersion in the printed media.

He defended his behaviour as necessary study for the conversations he had with the CEOs and Marketing Directors who were his clients.

"These guys aren't stupid," he said, defending the practice to Danny, who was having his own grumble about Steve's enslavement to the news. "And they expect me to be at least as well informed as they are. In fact, I really need to know more than they do, since much of the time I'm trying to persuade them to buy my viewpoint. Take last week. I couldn't have stood up in front of a hundred opinionated designers, telling them what to do with their brand, if I didn't know the global fashion market inside out."

"Well you might know the market, dear, but I see precious little evidence that your knowledge finds its way to your wardrobe," Danny replied with his usual waspishness.

Steve, with his usual restraint, had simply returned to his reading.

"So what do you make of the Taliban?" he asked Danny some time later.

"The Taliwho?"

"Taliban," Steve replied with a sigh. "They are the extremist Muslim guys who seem to have thrown the Russians out of Afghanistan. Their social policies make the Spanish Inquisition look like a Vicar's tea party."

Needless to say, this particular dialogue had me quite as confused as Danny. But it all came horribly clear in the days ahead as Lockerbie, the Taliban, Islamic extremism and a writer called Salmon Rushdie all arrived in the same big picture. Yes, I know I have named the writer after a fish. But that's how I heard it from Steve, as indeed did Danny, and I am trying to stay true to the chronology.

"Salmon who?" enquired Danny.

"For fuck's sake, it's Salman," muttered Steve. "The Satanic Verses, you know. Well, surely, even you know!"

Well actually, Danny didn't know. In truth, he was completely immersed in his world of haute couture fashion, a strange, closed world of pattern-cutting, draping and hanging, dummies and models, belts and buckles and mountainous egos, as I once heard Steve dismiss it.

However accurate the dismissal, this mysterious world allowed Danny little time for the gamut of interests that kept Steve inspired and informed.

He loved music. At least once a week, he would return home with a new cd that he would play four or five times in succession before delivering his definitive judgement, quantified with scores out of ten for each track, all of it then summated in an email that he would send to his circle of closest friends.

He loved movies. So, at least once a week, he would give me my dinner, pat me fondly on the head and disappear for a few hours, finally returning with a critique he would share with Danny and me. Since my knowledge of movies was limited to those screened on the living room television, much of his debrief passed me by. I rather suspected that, all too frequently, it was passing by Danny as well.