Simon Hoggart and I were almost contemporaries at the Guardian. He was on the frontline in Northern Ireland and politics as I battled it out in the somewhat less hostile climate of the City office. We came together on the same front in 1984 when we shared offices in Washington, he as the Observer's bureau chief (as the Americans like to say) and I as the Guardian's Washington correspondent.
It was in the nature of these things that during the 1988 presidential campaign we often found ourselves on the same campaign plane or bus, or sharing the same car ride across the vast empty cornfields and peering into the same pigsties as candidates searched for supporters in the Iowa caucuses. Amid the sameness there were the high points. The Rev Pat Robertson, the southern Baptist of the far Christian right, was chaperoned around a risque lingerie factory, chosen by some faceless campaign official as a place the minister could showcase the local Iowa textile industry. Not quite what the moral majority ordered. We found ourselves in Omaha, Nebraska, as Senator Lloyd Bentsen delivered a deadly blow to George Bush Sr's vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle with the putdown "You're no Jack Kennedy." Even in the pantheon of vice-presidents, never was one so easily forgotten.
In Haiti, after the fall of "Baby Doc", Simon and I, along with other western journalists, found ourselves rummaging through the rubble of the sacked presidential palace and escorted to the airport by gun-toting thugs.
We discovered an almost common birthday in May, shared over several decades, which led to the revelation that the Spectator's wine correspondent, to the last, would always order the house bottles. The whole list was overpriced, but the house glug the best value, one was informed.
Nearly a quarter of a century after we had returned to Britain, the Hoggarts, (Michael) Whites, Brummers and (Mark) Trans would share a Thanksgiving dinner in London, which last year we celebrated in early November. Simon regaled us with his rich political anecdotes and plied our glasses well, as if nothing was amiss.