"You look like a homeless person". Those are not the words that one normally uses to greet a friend whom one hasn't seen in nearly a year, but then most people aren't Mike Macdonald. I was waiting outside BK in Leicester Sq for him, and he had just come from Victoria, where he was just concluding the deal for the purchase of his second house in London. He asked me where I wanted to have lunch ("And no bloody Chinese food, obviously"), and I suggested Angus Steak House nearby. "No way, Angus is shite".... so I suggested that we have the lunch buffet at Chiquito, a Mexican restaurant next to Pizza Hut.

I first met Mike at the Singapore Guitar Festival over 2 years ago, and I did not notice this at the time, but he speaks in a strange mixture of a Scouse accent with a hint of Hong Kong and the occasional 'lah' tacked on to the end of his sentences. He's from Liverpool, but has been working in Singapore for the past few years as a financial analyst. He's not your average scouse though, since he can speak reasonably fluent Cantonese, which is because he once worked in HK.

He studied maths in university, and he was interested going into research in general relativity, but decided to go into market analysis rather than end up in 'Economy Class Land' (as he put it). Among other things, Mike is very clearly a genius. He did his O-levels when he was 13, and got accepted into Cambridge, but he decided to go into UMIST instead (apparently he thought Cambridge was too dull). He can play the guitar better than I can (at least that was the case the last time I heard him play, which was some time ago), yet he says that it's his THIRD instrument after recorder and piano. Not surprisingly, with brains like his, he's making loads of money, which is why I had no compunctions against getting him to buy me lunch. After all, he's only in London for a couple of weeks, and I probably won't see him again for a few months at least.

Intelligent and successful that he is, he has a tongue that is acerbic to say the very least. As PH observed when he met him, Mike is one of the best insulters that you'll ever meet. His vocabulary still consists of stuff you would expect from a working-class Liverpool background (his Scouse accent has been watered down, but having met his sister, I now know he's definitely from a working class family), like "I'm going to have to stick a mint up my arse by the time I'm done with this" when helping himself to the food at the buffet table.

Despite this, he is extremely intelligent and can still remember stuff from his university days which (presumably) he doesn't need in financial analysis. So, we were stuffing our face with ribs and chilli (I was, at any rate), and we had words like 'eigenvalues' and 'Riemann hypothesis' and 'Legendre polynomials' flying across the table. I was struggling to keep up my end of the conversation, like when he asked me about HOW we derived the Schrodinger equation.... I was even more lost when he told me how HE did it back in university.

He was always giving me advice on what to expect, and how to handle it, and a lot of it is on issues I've never even thought of. By 2pm, I had to go off to uni to register for the new term ("Oh alright...I have to bugger off that way though"). He might not be a friend I meet everyday, but talking to him never fails to be interesting.