I think my hieroglyphic for 4 February reads:
John & Mandy meal +B
…which I take to mean that John and Mandy and Bobbie came over to Clanricarde Gardens and I cooked them dinner.
I suspect that this was John & Mandy’s first visit there, so perhaps one or both of them remember the occasion better than i do.
John has so far signally failed to respond to my request for him to remember what he and I did a few weeks earlier:
…despite the fact that I can’t remember and cannot read my own handwriting. Infuriating.
My guess is that on 4 February I probably cooked something East Asian, although it might have been Southern Asian cuisine for that crowd.
Thoughts most welcome.
It was Mandy’s first visit but not mine. I’d come previously and I’m sure you Ogblogged it. I’m pretty sure my first visit coincided with you showing me that new fangled email thingy that everyone was raging about. We sent a message to one of the McGann brothers about his performance in a tv show about the Irish famine. Returning to the evening with Mandy and Bobby I know we had food – I think we discussed our identical methods for chopping garlic.
And looking again at your handwriting and recalling your recently mentioned love of Melati which I shared is it possible the mysterious word in your diary refers to the restaurant of that name?
Cheers John. I have no record of you visiting Clanricarde Gardens before that 4 February gathering, unless the evening preserved merely as January 1989 scrawl started or ended at my new flat, which it might have done. The new fangled e-mail thingie evening came much later – 1994 – when we first established Z/Yen. Binder Hamlyn was entirely pre e-mail and even in 1994, e-mail was quite a geeky, rudimentary thing that felt quite experimental in a business context until the late 1990s.
Yes, that January 1989 scrawl might say “Melati”. Let’s be honest, it might say anything we choose it to say. Do I take it that there are no written records at “White Manor” to help resolve these difficulties? Your diaries helped solve the Robert Plant temporal mystery, to the benefit of Ogblog and indeed the whole planet. It would be great if you were able to “do a Plant” again: http://ianlouisharris.com/1981/03/11/robert-plants-secret-gig-room-14-university-of-keele-students-union-uksu-11-march-1981/