When William Butler Smith wrote the above sentence on a cubicle wall in a toilet in Greenwich Park in 1898, he was doing so not to preserve the memory of his life long friend N.Odham MacGuinness, but more as an act of revenge.

It was in the same cubicle a few weeks previously that Odham MacGuinness had written ‘For salty fun sail with Captain Bill’ followed by Butler Smith’s address. This grubby, immature exchange between the two encapsulated the relationship the two shared for 89 years, ever since their chance meeting in a rice field in Anglia in 1895.

Throughout his life Odham MacGuinness or  Nod as he was often called, displayed this uncanny knack for not only being in the wrong place at the wrong time but also for managing to avoid being in the right place at the right time. More true to say he often managed to be in the ‘not so bad’ place fooling some of the people most of the time and not caring a hoot to boot. Butler Smith, it has to be said, could be anywhere at any time as long as he had 30 days notice.

These two men, along with several other bewildering characters would weave together to form a snaggly thread of the deepest puce; a blot upon the otherwise aesthetic  tapestry of Victorian life.