I'm going to share with everyone a series of anecdotes that go back 50 or more years. Lindsey, or Bogo, as his school friends knew him, and I met at Abingdon School when we were both very young and our voices had not yet broken. He was, and is, the best friend anyone could ever wish for.
 
Chapel Roof
 
It’s time to come clean about an escapade at Abington school. 
 
Lindsey and I had completed a civil defense course as part of our Army Cadet training and learned how to use ropes to lower people off the side of buildings and other survival skills. Well, one day, we decided to put our training to practical use and began looking for a fun project. We finally settled on climbing to the highest point of the school and leaving some kind of memento. We chose the school chapel.
 
To do this we needed to sure our adventure was not discovered and interrupted… and we wanted to make sure that we came out of the escapade alive. So, we devised a simple plan. We “borrowed” a rope from the army cadet locker, and we got some 6-inch pieces of wood to jam the bolts in all the doors leading up to the chapel. And at 4:00 am the morning before “Parents’ Day” we made our way silently to the top floor. 
 
We’d decided that Bogo was to be “anchor” and lookout and I was to be spiderman.  So, I climbed out the classroom window with the rope tied round my waist, made my way up a drainpipe and onto the chapel roof, Once on the peak, it was easy to sit astride it and inch across to the chapel cross at the far end.  Tucked in my vest I had a school cab and I now reached out and placed it right on top of the cross and tugged to make sure it was not going to blow away. 
 
Getting down was harder than getting up but we made it safely back to our dorm, removing the wooden door jams as we went, and got back into bed. The cap on the school chapel became Abingdon folklore  - but we have never admitted to being the authors until today.
 
No Women
 
When Lindsey and I were starting our careers in London, we both had apartments south of the river. Mine was in Battersea, his was just down the road in Clapham. At the weekends we would get away to Hayling Island where we bought a racing dinghy. We took sailing seriously and enrolled in a local sailing club and took lessons to get the basics right. 
 
In order to focus on our sailing, we resolved not to let any girlfriends interfere with our sport and promised each other that we would stick to a strict “no women“ policy no matter what. And it worked well for two weeks… that is until a group of dancers from the Royal Ballet came down to the island for a guest performance and our resolve was put to the test. 
A few months later, the Forge was filled with young women from the Royal Ballet as well as a certain young French teacher, and we knew we were not up to the challenge. Lindsay married the French teacher and I married a dancer from Royal.
 
In our private beer drinking moments, we often toasted our “no women“ period.