The weather is hot and sunny.  I walk through Kensington Gardens and into Hyde Park, into odd corners I have never visited before.

An old man (he turns out to be the same age as myself), is picking up scraps of rubbish thrown down by passers-by.  He is thin, unkempt and is missing most of his front teeth.

“I am only doing this because it is a beautiful place.  No one pays me”.

“Thank you, ” I say,” on behalf of everyone who uses the Parks”.

Then it all, comes out. He wants someone to talk to.  “”I’m a barrister and work for the Sultan of Brunei and also the ruler of the UAE, he tells me.   I am well  enough off not to need my pension, but last week I get a letter form the pension company threatening to fine me forty pounds a day if I didn’t draw my pension.   And do you know, the other day I got a telephone call in the Sultan’s office.  It was from the Bank of England: is the Sultan intending to remove the sixty billion pounds he has lodged with us?  I ask you, what sort of idiot phones the Sultan with a question like that?  Shows what a stupid government we have.

“I was born in Singapore and spent four years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.  When I got out I came to London and became a barrister by the time I was 19 (impossible, I thought, the truth dawning upon me).  But I got fed up with the law and took myself off to the Riviera, where I took money for deck chairs on the beach.  David Frost came by and asked me if I could help him get the same sort of job.  Then I met my wife.  She never told me she was a Countess with a castle in Austria until six months after we were married.  Anyway, she is dead now, so now I do free legal work for the poor.  The Law Society is threatening to dis-bar me because I am working for nothing.   Music?  I know Cameron Macintosh and Richard Branson too. I could play one off against the other and get you a great recording deal  for your music, or ………”.

“I’m so sorry.  My wife is waiting for me…”

He was fantasist, living in his own sort of Epicurean garden, where he was a successful professional, rich and influential, oblivious to the fact that the more he talked the less anyone could possibly believe.  He seemed happy.  Maybe we should do a bit more make-believing ourselves.