No fool, Jim

http://www.jim-kelly.co.uk/

It's his birthday today, Jim. My first sight of him was at the end of Platform 9 at King's Cross, waiting for the 17:45 to Ely. Like many habitual city commuters he waited for the train in the same way you'd wait for a bus; it's there to do a job, don't get stressed by it, it'll appear.

What set him apart was the laptop, slung round his back like a guitar, and the stillness. His head had already left his workaday world and had tuned in to something else. I often watched his back - all the best actors know how to act with their back; wondered what sort of story it told. What the job he'd left was, what was the job he was going to, or at least pondering.

When his first book appeared and his CV became more public I discovered that my hunches were correct, that he'd worked as a journalist, successfully, for fifteen years at the FT and that during those long commutes he was writing his first book. Philip Dryden was born on the 17:45 to Ely.

While I read, Jim wrote. Now we drink beer together, and neither of us read or write while we're doing that.