News from Norfolk

Katy was more or less the last person I’d have expected to run into while queuing for the ATM tucked away behind the drinks section in our tiny village shop. As she mimed exaggerated amazement, rushing to kiss me loudly on both cheeks — and, in doing so shoved poor old Mrs Wigglesworth out of the way, so that she had to brace herself against cases of cut-price lager —I reflected that I probably hadn’t seen Katy in real life since someone else’s half-forgotten wedding back in the mid 1990s, if not before. 

Seeing Katy in the media was, of course, something else altogether. As a sort of comms person and all-around fixer for one of our better known and, at least in electoral terms and until relatively recently, one of our more successful political parties, there had been times over recent years when Katy could be glimpsed almost daily in the background of prime ministerial walkabouts, press conferences and, not infrequently, resignation announcements. 

Toby and I, recalling her all too well from university days, used to laugh about this. Governments rose and fell — Katy, with her undentable enthusiasm and utter lack of shame, endured. 

And now here she was, standing in the Coop, tall and thin and antic, laughing gaily at me as I helped Mrs Wigglesworth pick up her far-scattered shopping, filling the air around her with wafts of some expensive modern scent resembling no flower that ever bloomed on earth, taking the opportunity to push ahead of me and take a great fist-full of notes out of the ATM before we resumed our conversation outside on the little lane.