No, I don't suppose you have.
But one of them has just been to stay in the south of France, while another is coming close enough for us to visit at the end of the month.
Dylan, as I shall call the judge, and I met on holiday in Peru some years ago. We shared an interest in football and, as it turned out later, politics and folk music. This may sound most unjudgelike, but it is wrong to be too judgmental in such matters.
In any event, the four of us, that is including our wives, agreed to meet up back home.
Such "you must come sometime" arrangements usually lead nowhere, in my experience. But a few months later, my team was playing Dylan's team and we were asked to stay.
The invitation was accompanied by a plaintive request that I should be in charge of acquiring the match tickets. It did cross my mind that the whole point of becoming a judge should be that getting football tickets will be a doddle, but such a thought naturally did me no credit.
On arrival for our short stay, I warned m'learned friend that since I could obtain tickets only for my (visiting) team's part of the ground, he would have to promise to be on his best behaviour and remain silent and inanimate if - as happened, of course - his side scored and won. He dutifully sat on his hands.
Back at his house, my wife asked if I had seen any of the usual crowd I meet at games. Yes, I replied, Dougal the headmaster was there, a couple of rows behind us.
"Dougal," the judge interjected. "Is that a common first name in the North East? One of my best pals at university was called that."
And it was indeed Dylan's Dougal. The pair had more or less lost touch as one rose in the legal profession, the other, via at least one other career, in teaching.
The next day, the judge went off on holiday, wearing his favourite tee-shirt showing a small boy aiming a peashooter at a car and reading: "Lee Harvey Oswald, aged three." We made our farewells, me promising to let Dougal know of the coincidence.
"There were three of us, you know," my other pal said when I rang. "The other one was 'umphrey from 'astings. We were always together as undergraduates."
No one in this inconsequential little story is really called Dylan, Dougal or 'umphrey. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, and the guilty.
The guilty? Well, I had to ask what had become of 'umphrey (I considered but rejected Zebedee as his pseudonym). "Oh, he's in prison," I was told. Something to do with drugs.
"But has he learned his lesson?" I wondered. "Only," Dougal said severely, "to the extent of being bloody sure he won't get caught next time."
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