Bricklayers

It’s Reg Presley’s funeral this week. I didn’t know him in the ’60s, but I met him a few times in recent years at a biannual event called the Strummers, Thumpers and Scribblers Lunch (self-explanatory, really). At one of those functions I found myself out on the balcony of the restaurant, listening to a conversation between Reg and Bill Wyman: they were discussing in some detail the finer points of the building’s exterior brickwork. Reg had started as a brickie, and Bill’s dad had been one. Somehow I can’t imagine, in 30 or 40 years’ time, a similar conversation between a Radiohead and a Foal.