I left the brigade of Guards in June 2003, three months after the beginning of the war in Iraq, and my path and the one Bots travelled along crossed on a few occasions. However, there’s one in particular that our conversation in the American hotel room brought swiftly to mind. Not having a wish to count the days on my fingers, I’m guessing it was about five years or so ago that Viscount Bottomly and I met purely by the word that I have been thinking of whilst I slept, and the word would be—luck.
I wouldn’t normally be so utterly confident about the timing of a meeting, although journals are kept at The Hall, primarily for recording the dates of dinner parties, guests who attended them, and of course the food served, with diaries being similarly kept in the Estate Office, for the recording
