My best friend Jeffrey Archer
Jeffrey Archer was my closest and dearest friend for 40 years. I first met him in 1986 when we were invited to be judges for a Royal Watercolour Society Open Exhibition. We hit it off immediately. There was an ebullience and lightness in him that I warmed to. We met up later for dinner and carried on meeting once or twice a week ever since. Yesterday, I went to the restaurant where we used to have breakfast and I almost ordered eggs benedict in his memory – he was always the one for the unhealthy option – but I just couldn’t bear to. He never talked about his own death, though he sometimes joked about what he’d say at my funeral; he was all about life and the immediate future. He was, in fact, talking about the future up to the time he died, about his plans for writing.
