A bright New Year’s Day and I am sitting in the fashionable Chelsea bistro ‘Hereafter’ waiting for Keef, as I know him, to arrive.
Amazingly, he is there on time, threading his way through the tables, pausing only to smack one punter round the head.
“Said he thought I was dead,” he explains as he sits down. I asked him what he thought of 2016. Pausing only to drink a bottle of vodka and smoke a pack of cigarettes, he replied, “Shit, wannit? Load a mates and good guys gone, fucking great band up there now.”
I ask him if he was worried that he may have joined the star studded list. “Nah, mate, me, I’m immortal.”
I smile at the reply but he responds coldly. “Think I’m taking the piss? Electric fire falls in me bath, plug comes out second before it hits the water, car catches fire and explodes minute after I get out, tree falls and smashes greenhouse. I wasn’t in it but, y’know, I could’ve been.” He looks a bit sheepish after the last revelation.
Later, we say our goodbyes on the pavement outside. He steps into the road in front of a laden cement truck, which swerves straight into a minibus carrying, for some unfathomable reason, three members of TOWIE, Dame Maggie Hench, Sir Bernard Luvvie, and a drummer who once played with the Moody Blues.
Keef turned to me with a smile and a shrug. “See!”
