This photograph was taken by my tech guy Ali in Sydenham on December 20, 2013. He was fixing a problem with Mark’s mobile phone, and realising that in the 20+ years of our collaboration we had never been photographed together, I asked him to take a snap of the two of us. Actually that is not quite true; apart from any CCTV footage, a woman took a number of photographs of us in a group at Mark’s 50th birthday party promising to forward them in due course. And didn’t. I should have known better than to trust any woman after the last one.

If the pose of this photograph bears more than a passing resemblance to that classic snap of the Kray Twins, it is entirely accidental. I have often told Mark our names will be forever linked in the annals of infamy like that other renowned double act. No, not Morecambe & Wise – Evans & Christie. Evans was far from the innocent he is usually made out to be, and likewise although Mark has always been the junior partner in this enterprise, without him I would have achieved very little. It was fate in the shape of Chris Tame that brought us together, and it was Mark who inspired both Liars Out To Have Good Memories and the mass of anti-Searchlight publications (including the website) that followed. It was likewise Mark who inspired my researches into the Jewish Question, and without him my Satpal Ram website would never have materialised.

Although he has a full social calendar and I am forever lost in cyber-space, we usually manage to meet up once a week, and over the past two and a half years he has provided the ammunition for a fair number of my news articles.

My New Year’s resolution for 2014 is to write a lot less of those, but we still have a lot of work to do together, including continuing to build his own website, and maybe to add some more material to SearchlightArchive from 2002 onwards.