I caught up with a friend of mine at Covent Garden yesterday. He is a Rhodes Scholar studying at Oxford, a huge Fred Astaire fan and wears a Fedora everywhere he goes. His name is PJ Thum and he is also the first Singaporean to swim the English Channel.

I met PJ nearly 18 months ago at a speaking engagement at Hertford College in Oxford – indeed he was the one who had organised it and invited me. He hadn’t swum the channel by that stage but had already achieved some amazing things. He swam for Singapore at the Olympic Games at Atlanta in 1996. And he’d just got back from a ‘Future World Leaders’ conference in the States where BB King, Aretha Franklin and James Brown put on a little show for the brightest and best from around the world.

The great thing about PJ is that when he tells you about all these amazing feats it is with a wide-eyed enthusiasm that suggests he can’t believe how lucky he has been. After swimming the Channel he was feted as a local hero back in Singapore. Huge crowds waited at Changi airport for his arrival. And his picture was splashed across all the local newspapers and magazines. But the story he delights in telling is arriving to have lunch with the Singaporean President and being able to tell the guard at the gate ‘I’m here to see the President.’

It hasn’t been all providence, of course. It’s also been a lot of bloody hard work. But I like the way PJ walks around with a grin on his face like he’s the luckiest guy to have ever walked the planet.

I guess in many ways he is.

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