Obviously, numerous emails were exchanged while this column was being prepared. We also chatted via Google chat a number of times, though these were primarily, even almost solely, related to the text and our comments on it.

Toward the end, however, we actually chatted - discussing the sort of things that old acquaintances that sort-of remember each other talk about: Do you remember ...?, What street did you live on?, When did you ...? And as an extension of that, we even found an opportunity for a video chat:

          

Which was perhaps the sort of thing that might have been expected to happen considerably earlier.