I’ve mentioned once before that I know a man who’s known as Lofty and who lives in Corsham. The strange thing is that every single time I have a conversation with him, it just so happens that he is intoxicated with alcohol. But, anyway, it had been quite a while since I’d last seen him until I happened to bump into him just the other day.
“Hello, Sir,” he said as he approached me.
“Hello!” I said happily in reply.
“You’re very tall,” he said, “I used to be that tall too, but I’ve gotten two inches smaller since I got old. My father, he lost one inch, but me, I lost two inches.”
“Well I’m sorry to hear that it seems to have doubled,” I replied.
“Nah,” he said, waving his arm forward in an ‘I don’t care’ way. “You know, I was born during the same year as Elvis.”
“Elvis Presley?”
“Oh? You’ve heard of him have you?” he asked, genuinely surprised.
“Yes, I have.”
“Oh, well I’m 77 years old, and he’s dead. Now, some people might say he was more successful than me, but who’s the one who’s still alive? At age 16 I lied about my age and joined the army, now here I am alive and well and Elvis is dead!” Lofty found this thought pretty funny and started laughing about it. I decided I would join him in this.
“And how old are you, Sir?” he asked me, after his laughter was over.
“I’m 19,” I told him.
“And what do you do?”
“I go to the Bath Spa University.”
“Ah, that makes sense, you look like you’re intelligent, you look like you have brains!”
Just then, my friend Dalfino arrived.
“This young man is a true gentleman, don’t you agree?” he asked Dalfino.
“Yes, I would,” he said.
Lofty’s smaller friend then arrived and said “I’m sorry. You’ve never met this man before in your life have you? C’mon Lofty, we better be going!” and with that, the pair of them had wandered off into the streets. This was my latest encounter with Lofty and, I want to point out that I’m not writing these entries about him to mock him, rather because I think he can be quite funny and think that other people may enjoy reading about him.
