Driving through Ealing, I said to Drake, my passenger “Oooh look, that’s Keith Vaz, take a pic, quick”. “Which one is he?” asked Drake. By now, we were stopped in traffic adjacent to Vaz and his group, who were decked out with red rosettes, obviously on the campaign trail (Ealing Central and Acton being a marginal). He seemed to be looking directly at me and he was smiling.“Good luck Keith!” I shouted, quite disingenuously, if I'm honest - I just had an instant desire to engage. Keith waved. “He’s the one waving” I said to Drake, who, with the expert timing of a sniper, took the shot. Then Keith called back, with a surprisingly controlled delivery “How are YOU?!” with the emphasis on the “you”, making it sound like he really did know me. That had the effect on my emotional self, as was intended by Keith, I'm sure, of pleasing me. Conversely, my logical, skeptical, soft-machine self was simultaneously noticing that this person was behaving like he knows me, when he obviously doesn’t. As a consequence, since my logical self generally holds sway, my instincts were immediately veering towards mistrust. All this happened in a split second, and, momentarily, I dwelled on the character assessment process, as it whirred around my head. Yes, I thought, he’s a consummate politician, so, meeting and greeting is his thing, his specialism. “What’s he do?” asked Drake. “He’s the chairman of one of those House of Commons select committees that controls…er…other committees, and stuff, I think”. I’d not been a particular follower of Keith Vaz, but over the years, I had noticed him. I’d especially noted his precise, clipped style of diction. I think I knew he was once a lawyer, and that’s what he sounded like. He always seemed very sharp and intelligent as though he knew something everyone else was ignorant of. When I got home, I looked him up on Wiki. He’d been into all sorts of things, some of which brought him into conflict with others, but my overall impression was that he might have a mysterious side. The other day, someone I knew was telling me about a mutual acquaintance and they explained how another friend, a lawyer, as it happens, had described the mutual acquaintance as: “perpetually giving the impression that there was a piece of the puzzle missing”. The subject of the description certainly wasn’t Keith Vaz, but I think there is a type of person, a type who retains, quite deliberately, a piece of the puzzle, neatly tucked away. Then again, perhaps we all do.