However, there was a bit of grit in the oyster – in terms of his assessment of THIS VERY BLOG THAT YOU READ E’EN NOW.

GFiPR: “Don’t get me wrong: I love your theatre reviews. And it’s always funny to see how excited you get when writing about tits.”

E: “Do I write about tits?”

GFiPR: (Ignoring the question) It’s just that I think your blog has got a bit -

E.: “A bit “Dr. Huxtable” of late? A bit “Wow I love my children and isn’t there a lot of good in the world when you look in the right place”?

GFiPR: “A bit. You need to nasty it up a bit.”

E.: “Nasty it up?”

GFiPR: “Nasty it the fuck up.”

That’s me told. “Stop looking incredulous when Junior Clients talk.”, “You don’t need to wear a Sports Jacket to a Garden Centre.”, “Four fingers is too much.” – just tell me once and I am ON IT.

Which is just as well, because this new nastiness gives me the opportunity to write about someone whom I would happily kick to death: “Box Ticking Account Guy”.

Fucking HELL. Is there anything more detrimental to any kind of creative thinking than some tool hovering nervously by your “desk environment working space solution opportunity” or whatever the hell it’s called now, piping up if you’re going to be able to write “somewhere between 13 and 15 slides” (I’m not joking) on Brand X and the emotional journey of floor cleaning? I’m a Planner. I’ve been doing this for nearly twenty years. I could write a thesis on the agons and oppositions implicit within lavatory paper communications – so it’s not (remarkably) the revolting content that makes me want to smash things. It’s the bureaucratic, Health and Safety, fitting it onto a wall chart pettiness of it that makes me so angry.

This guy is the embodiment of “Process” and “Routine” - and whilst I appreciate that someone has to make sure that the work gets done at a certain time, for a certain deadline, this over-emphasis on how many charts, what the shitting chart background is going to be, and whether or not I’ll be using Clip Art curls my toes with such ferocity that they end up pedicuring my heels. When I’m wearing shoes. There’s a monthly “Work in Progress” meeting that we have with our clients, which is scheduled precisely to ensure that the many things that come up “out of the blue” in the process of developing communications, and which need approval, have an environment in which that can happen. It’s a period of time that is put in diaries to ensure that we can always – at least – be sure of THAT time with Clients, and if there’s nothing to approve, discuss or brief, we cancel the meeting.

So, what is Box-Ticking Account Guy’s brilliant approach to this regular meeting? To ask the Agency’s Business Directors to submit an agenda three weeks before it happens. That’s like scripting an improvisation, or scheduling some spontaneity (both of which I would imagine he would view as a very good idea). God! How I long for the return of Enthusiastic Account Guy and his passion for the work, over the Excel spreadsheets! Fortunately, he returns in mid-July, and he and I are already hatching a plan of enormous enormance.

The Confucian East has done him the power of good, as has his new partner, and he is now a calmer, happier, more content man – although he has lost none of his energy, humour and wit. He was, as ever, a great help to me across a range of topics, but none more so than on the subject of my long-fermenting book and how to kick-start it. Sound advice was issued over coffee (which was accompanied by what I can only describe as an altar of suspended chocolate truffles), along with an offer of help.

There are a few people whom one can really count on to do as they promise – and these are your real friends. It’s not a question of how long you’ve known each other, or common backgrounds, or anything prosaic: it’s about a genuine desire to see someone else happy, and a desire, then a determination, to do what you can to affect that.

Father used to say “You are lucky if you can count your friends on your fingers, and your good friends on your thumbs.” – I think I may be slightly luckier than that,  but I defer to his wisdom (increasingly so, now: to mis-quote Mark Twain: “When I was fifteen, I thought my father was a fool. By the time I was twenty one, it was amazing how much he had learned.”) in this and all things – but I think I might be right in saying that I would be able to do his dictum service if I had just one more thumb…

But the highlight was probably going to a Hawker Centre, or local food court, where (seemingly) hundreds of individual stalls serve speciality dishes which are brought to your table and paid for piecemeal.

Not only was the food (and the company, needless to say) absolutely outstanding, but it gave me one of only two tastes of genuinely Asian cuisine that I was to have on that trip (the other two were also with my adopted weekend family, and was just as excellent) – and thus a FANTASTIC opportunity to show off to those of my colleagues who had (as had I, until then) been considering such local specialities as Balsamic-flavoured Tenderloin with Wilted Spinach and Parmesan Air (to quote). God, I bored them SENSELESS with fond memories prefaced with “When we went to the Hawker Centre…” It is a mark of my colleagues essential kind-heartedness that they didn’t punch me square in the face.

I would have done.

I have just come back from Singapore (which is, in itself, quite a green thing), where I had (amongst other things) two remarkable green things: the first was the finest Green Apple Martini in the world (wincingly sour, as it should be – and yours to enjoy in The Cigar Bar at the Grand Hyatt). The other was a Green Tea Kit Kat – an absolutely extraordinary thing: green as a Martian with a massive hangover, but with no discernible taste of Green Tea (in fact it tasted like a Kinder Egg), it was originally from Japan and had been imported along with a number of its siblings in a catering size box to complement the Green Tea drunk by Good Friend in PR and his new, excellent boyfriend. It was all very excitingly novel and has left me with a taste for highly coloured foodstuffs, which may now never leave me.

I wonder how intrigued the casual observer would have been then, to have happened upon the following scene and tried to “work backwards” to the natural starting point: Good Friend in PR and me, in a bar in Singapore, singing (LOUDLY) to “Hey Jude” that is being performed by a local band, surrounded by Asian businessmen in their 50s who were accompanied by prostitutes, at a table next to a German man who appears to have been drinking orange juice (but has somehow got so drunk that he has picked up a bar stool and is waving it over his head, as he pleads for the band to perform “The Final Countdown” by 80s dignityphobes “Europe”) and is dancing like a maniac.

He and I had an epic gad – and a night that began very sedately with Good Friend in PR, and Woman Who Managed to Make Sense of Digital to Me in a very nice hotel – and one that I wish I could experience more often (ideally because we lived on the same street, but that is not to be): but it is not a night I shall forget.

This phrase “we’re nowhere on…” comes from a time when Best Friend, Old Friend at Work and Heavily Sweating Planner (as well as Account Director Who Over-Shares About Her Menstrual Cycle) worked at an Agency whereat the Managing Director enjoyed nothing more than running into the Creative Department the day before a big meeting (ideally a pitch) to return some time later screeching “We’re nowhere on [insert relevant brand here]!” with a mixture of smugness, panic and awe. He loved the sheer drama of being lamentably under-prepared for a meeting, which was lucky, as he presided over an Agency that was unprepared for anything at all… Old Friend at Work and I (in particular) have adopted “We’re nowhere on…” as a handy descriptor of our position on, readiness for, or attitude towards any number of subjects: thus “I’m nowhere on this four hour research review”, “I’m nowhere on Mondays in general” and “I’m nowhere on the entire judging panel of “Strictly Come Dancing”.”

Anyway, the fact remains that we are nowhere on a pudding for Christmas Day.

The main course is Goose (although quite how we’re going to cook it is up in the air, as Wife is very anti any “fruit plus meat” combination – and trying to find a recipe that doesn’t use apple, orange or even apricots is like finding a heterosexual at a Bette Midler concert – so any suggestions would be gratefully received), and it’s coming with the usual accompaniments of roast potatoes, parsnips, sprouts, red cabbage, carrots: so it’s not like everyone won’t be pretty well fed by the time pudding comes round.

It’s partly for this reason that we have eschewed Christmas Pudding. Quite how anyone could eat anything quite so leadenly heavy after such an enormous meal is slightly beyond me – especially if one’s going to have cheese, and if you’re not going to have cheese then WHAT is the point of doing it at all? I can’t remember what we did last year, when Father in Law, Bearded Decorator and Good Friend in PR were here – I’ve got a strange feeling that it might have been ice-cream, or sorbet (which though unseasonably cold is more refreshing and light than anything else I can imagine). Oh well, fuck it. We’ve got our work cut out this year already, with an apparently endless string of invitations, which appear to overlap (which is lovely) and leave no time at all to do stuff like cook the food, or wrap any presents (which isn’t).

Don’t worry: I know all of you look to this site for many things other than a sardonic smile, a wistful dream that you actually knew me, and a laser-like analysis of the communications industry – and one of those things is an update on what my family and I eat. I shall NOT disappoint you.

I’m not going to be pretend that there aren’t some barriers. He lives in New York, and he’s just signed a lease on an incredible new flat in the middle of Manhattan, and he doesn’t think that he’s going to move in the short term. But to be fair, he does acknowledge that I tend to be predictively accurate, so I am hopeful.

I am not sure where my specific time frame came from (“You will be living in London in the next thirteen months”), but I think it was really an indication that I wanted and expected him to be here by next Christmas (he’ll be here for Christmas this year, with us, as he was last year), because it was great to have him back in London for a few days.

He remains my drinking Nemesis: yet another night out with him, that began with an (allegedly – as I can’t stand them, but Wife adores them) amazing Bloody Mary at the house, ended with a return home for us both at 3.30am. This had been preceded by a drunken attempt to find some swings (we had previously been musing on whether or not playgrounds for adults would get a green light, conceptually – and both gave it a hearty thumbs up), which wasn’t entirely successful, but which enabled the evening to end on a pleasantly hedonistic note.

So – thirteen months, and counting.

Conversation ranged from his plans to look at some new apartments (one, in particular, confirming his billing as “Fancy Gay”), the sentimentality of the Obama nomination (and the likelihood of McCain gliding into office on the back of it), Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, and alternative employment options for us both (none, it turned out).

We went to The Landmark – a great restaurant that he’d taken me to before – where we both devoured epic steaks, and some fabulous Rioja. There was another brief interlude at Soho House (where he was staying that night, in a room that was a cross between a Princess’ bedroom in a fairy tale and a Shoreditch bar), up on the roof terrace, where we switched to a pretty perfect Gigondas, and then our separate ways: he, down two floors, me, forty blocks up town.

It was a great evening – easy-going, far from frenetic and even accommodating a few silences – one of the ones that you have with great friends, where you could be anywhere, just catching up and (to use a horrible, but apt word) bonding. He’s coming to London for a Christening whereat he’s a Godfather in a week’s time – so we’ll see him then, and I am really looking forward to it.

This is Wife’s idea of town planning, and my idea of hell. I don’t mean that typical male cliche of “I can’t stand shopping, me” – but let me put the facts before you. We arrived (on a coach, which was something of a first for me since the days of school Rugby tours) at 9.45, before the shops opened, and we left at 6.45pm. We had twenty minutes for lunch – so for almost nine solid hours, we went round shops and bought things.

In its defence, I will confess that this place did a pretty good line in shops: Gucci, Prada (where WIfe relieved them of three dresses), TSE, Calvin Klein, Missoni – the whoel Bond Street thing, basically, mocked up to look like the location for Hitchcock’s “The Birds” (including a steepled building, presumably a Church of Shopping, which shows that they have understood their target audience pretty perfectly).

In the evening, we went over to Good Friend in PR’s flat (the Tribeca location of which marks him out as, in Acclaimed Photographer Friend’s view as “a fancy gay”), and then onto a great fish restaurant, where one of APF’s other great friends is the manager. She gave us the best table, the best service, and free Champagne: she had been primed by APF to expect us and she saw that we were treated like kings, exemplifying, as we agreed the difference between British service (“Let’s just get through this and pretend that each other is invisible”) and American service (“Let’s pretend that I am genuinely pleased to be serving you, and that nothing is too much trouble, because I am your FRIEND”). And then we went on to Soho House – and that’s when it all went wrong in terms of sheer amount of alcohol consumer in a companionable and funny night that saw us getting to bed at 2am – but given that (thanks to the children) this sort of hedonism is very much the exception, rather than the rule, I don’t see anything wrong with that (other than the headache that was left as a little aide-memoire for us when we awoke…)

One night saw him (with typical flair) take us to two of the best rooftop bars in New York: the first, at his club, the very ritzy Soho House, the second, the tiny but beautiful bar at the top of the 60 Thompson hotel. We had a great time with him (he’s having a rather trying time, but dealing with everything with his customary generosity, good humour and grace), which explains why, although we both had separate dinner arrangements, he left Wife and I in Soho House when he went back to his flat, before joining us later.

As we sat on the roof terrace, being served by a waitress who (in Wife’s immortal phrase was “distracted by her own breasts” – understandably, as it happens, but anyway…), we talked about the difference in our characters, agreeing that one of my dominant character traits is to over-think, over-analyse (and thus) over-worry about pretty much everything. I suggested that it might be, in part, my job that makes me behave like this (analysis being something of a leitmotif in Planning), but she feels that the behaviour is more fundamental than that).

She also feels that I let my very English embarrassment gene kick in too easily. Citing a series of photographs that she took for her exhibition (in which she dressed as a giant, eerie rabbit – think Donnie Darko – and cavorted across a series of twilit landscapes to the amusement of the amassed onlookers), she said to me: “The thing is, darling: sometimes, you’ve got to wear the rabbit suit. You may feel a tit, but that’s the only way to get it done.” She’s right – sometimes, you have got to wear the rabbit suit – which will be a nice surprise for my colleagues at work.

After a great dinner at Matsuri, with Acclaimed Photographer Friend, we headed back over to Good Friend in PR’s current outpost – 60 Thomson. It’s a super chic hotel, and he was chic to match: cool haircut and a very svelte frame meant that he fits right into this sort of place (whereas I still manage to look like I really ought to be limited to bookshops) and we went up to the rooftop bar – the second of the night. What a view: absolutely breath-taking, and although we couldn’t stay long (Wife was not so fresh from her Go-Go Dancer baptism), we had a wonderful time.