Andrew Barrow recalls an afternoon with Francis Bacon Thirty-eight years ago I was a struggling writer still in my 20s. Francis Bacon was 66 years old and not only the most famous painter in the world but also a great London character. I had often seen him scurrying around South Kensington and Soho, always in a leather jacket, usually alone and occasionally fantastically drunk - but I had never spoken to him. On Saturday 22 February 1975 I emerged from San Frediano's in Fulham Road after lunching with my old friend James Graham. At the same moment Francis Bacon shot out of another doorway with the portrait painter Robert Buhler, whom we both knew slightly. Within seconds we were talking and Buhler had invited James and me to come along with them to the nearby Chelsea Arts Club, where more bottles of wine were opened and the poet Tambimuttu photographed me chatting with Bacon. An hour or two later Buhler had disappeared, leaving Bacon, James and me to fend for ourselves. Unable to find a taxi, James did his usual thing of stopping a passing car and asking its bemused occupant to give us all a lift to his new home in Knightsbridge. James's young wife seemed entirely equal to welcoming the world's most celebrated living artist into her new home, and Bacon himself seemed sufficiently at ease to go upstairs to the bathroom, comb his famous kiss-curl and even shave with our host's old-fashioned razor. Later, Bacon and I left the house and hailed a black cab to take us to his home-from-home, the Colony Room in Soho. At the small first-floor club in Frith Street we were greeted by the famous Muriel Belcher from her seat inside the door. On this occasion Bacon did not come out with his famous "champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends!" but simply rapped out, "Bottle of champagne!" to the barman. After helping him consume this - and another bottle - I tottered off to boast about my adventures to my current girlfriend, only to get reprimanded with the words, "You creep!" In the years that followed I saw Bacon sporadically. My last sighting of the man Cecil Beaton said knew better than anyone "how to pick the scab off the wound of contemporary anxiety" came in 1991 when I was heading up to High Street Kensington with my eight-year-old son, Nicholas. Bacon admired my son's home-knitted jumper, and asked him where he got it. A year later Francis Bacon died suddenly in Spain, leaving the world and London a much less exciting place. The Great Book of Mobile Talk, overheard by Andrew Barrow and observed by Posy Simmonds, is published by Square Peg tomorrow