As is my wont at this time of year, I was having a tidy round the study yesterday in the hope of clearing the decks ready to get back to work after the break and I came across this old copy of The Advocate with the stunning 22-year old Christopher Rice on the cover. This was thirteen years ago and, in his mid-thirties Rice is still a stunningly attractive man. He is an author and a good one. He writes thrillers and I vividly remember a holiday with friends in a Suffolk farmhouse where his Density of Souls was my reading material: I read it lying on my bed in that farmhouse almost in one sitting, only being tempted out for meals. I have lost touch with his most recent books but people I trust tell me they only get better and better and he is on his way to fulfilling all the early promise he showed in the books I have read.
But above all that, the reason, having found this magazine in a drawer, that I decided to share it here, and in fact the reason I bought it from the Internet in the first place was that I remember being stopped in my tracks seeing this image of Rice for the first time because he bears a shocking resemblance to the first boy I ever fell in love with... So I'm beginning the New Year with a smidgen of nostalgia.. what else is new...