"Tiny robots!"

Yes, the spirit of the great Rowley Birkin moves among us.

One of the new 'regulars' in one of my favoured hangouts is one of those classic long-time China expats; someone who's imbibed just a little too much a little too often and is now getting a little too long in the tooth to continue in such a fashion; someone whose grip on reality - or at any rate on conversational coherence - is loosening just slightly.

When he's on a roll, his anecdotes really take on a Birkin-esque quality: the same slightly agressive enthusiasm, the same wild fluctuation of pace and tone and volume, the same elaborately descriptive hand gestures, and the same intermittent descent into inaudibility or unintelligibility - punctuated by sudden brief explosions of emphatic lucidity on key phrases.

One of these monologues overheard last week went something like this (imagine indistinct burbling or apparent nonsense words in the gaps):

"........ big problem....... tiny robots!...... state-of-the-art...... get into places where other things can't...... nothing quite like it in China...... need more funding......"

I recall that Paul Whitehouse has claimed his great drunk raconteur character was in fact closely modelled on someone (an ex-FCO type, I think it was) he once met on a fishing trip in Iceland. Perhaps it's quite a well-established phenomenon. I hope it never happens to me!