In early 2003, when I was doing my GCSEs and Google was a more young and hopeful place, I searched for my own name. ‘Ed Cumming’ throws up a few different things online and we needn’t go into all of them here, but the salient discovery was that there was another Ed Cumming. He was a student at Cambridge, evidently a few years older than me, with a publicly visible email address. I sent him a note. ‘How funny, we have the same name,’ I said, or words to that effect. ‘Right you are, you little freak,’ he replied, or words to that effect, with the polite reserve of someone edging away from a lunatic at a bar.
20 years later, we finally arranged to meet. I needed a free lunch in a hurry. Kolae, a smart new Thai restaurant in Borough Market, graciously stepped up.
Location: Old Spoons