Circa Spring 1983 in Exeter, England, my Northaptonian girl-friend Frances Boulton and I were on our way to a dinner. Our hostess was Japanese Akiko and the date for dinner was 7 o'clock. We were like a couple of God's innocent lambs walking in the streets from Frances' s residence in Haldon Road to St Thomas Avenue where Akiko lived, and we were to arrive on time. After crossing the bridge over the River Exe, I eyed a pub by the river. For me, passing a pub when seeing one was a thing impossible--a thing I had in common with Zoe daughter of Augustus John, the celebrated Welsh painter to whom Thamas Hardy, Lawrence of Arabia, Dylan Thomas and Bernard Shaw, among many others, sat to be painted. Zoe was describing to me while we were in the Vic Inn, Exeter sipping Canadian Club rye whiskey, the way to her residence. Zoe said to me, "On the left-side corner of the road you will pass a pub--that is, if you could pass it." Zoe was a stage director, and she invited me to her place because I talked a lot about modern drama. When Frances became aware of my smelling my way into the pub (Cf: "Let him smell his way to Dover," as one of the Lear daughters says after blinding Gloucester), she pleaded me not go in as we only had a couple of minutes to reach Akiko's. As much as I knew my way to the pub, I knew my way to Frances's palate. I invited her to a double sweet martini on the rocks, and she didn't say, no, whereas I rushed to my pint(s) of lager. We reached Akiko's at 8, exactly an hour too late. She received us with a concealed frown. As we sat down to eat, her boyfriend, a Vietnamese, dropped in. After dinner, the Vietnamese turned out to be a Chinese calendar expert. He told Akiko she was born in the year of the snake, and Frances in the year of the boar and I in the year of the monkey. On our way back, Frances was reviewing the years of our births. She commented that Akiko with her small, beady and rolloing-around eyes really looks to have been born in the year of the snake, and that Frances herself was really born in the year of the boar because all her life she dashed into things and people and here she concentrated her eyes on me meaning me, and that I was really born in the year of the monkey due to my theatrics and love of drama and dramatics.