circa 1968

There was a party for Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue last week. Jonathan Barrow died in a car crash in 1970, very shortly after writing The Queue, aged twenty-two. The party was most generously funded by Andrew Barrow, Jonathan’s brother – who has shepherded this book through the decades, through at least a couple of almost-publications, and has written in detail about it and about Jonathan in Animal Magic – and hosted by Martin Barrow, another of the brothers, and his wife Noriko. The party was, after far too long, a celebration of this book. Among those gathered were Andrew’s children and my own and many with long memories; one came with photographs of Jonathan in the late 1960s, some of which Andrew had never seen before; two of those are above. Jonathan was as an artist as well as a writer (and hotel worker, advertising copywriter, brilliant parodist, etc); some of his drawings are in The Queue, others in Animal Magic.