I met him only after I became master of St Peter's College, Oxford, but he had a palpable gift for friendship and within minutes of our first encounter he was coming up with schemes and plots to help the college.
The former certainly looks like a prizefighter who has been battered senseless by a meaner, leaner opponent; the latter has endured an equally bruising encounter in the ring but has walked away bleeding badly but still standing after a 12-round points draw.
In Cambridgeshire, he is diabolical and sinister and those who encounter him should look the other way, since his appearance is said to warn of a death in the family.
Each encounter reveals what ingredients they use, which cookbooks they swear by and where they like to shop and eat.
In fact I am sure that I never experienced, as a child, any kind of encounter with the sublime, that catch in the throat, that tightness of the lungs, that sudden, roaring sense of one's extreme smallness in a huge, awful, beautiful world.
In such moments natural beauty becomes a kind of devastation – it is pure encounter, too compressed in time and space to be properly contained.
The blog includes picture of him on a private jet with the late South African leader Nelson Mandela, and a detailed account of a 2010 encounter with Vladimir Putin who, he said, told him he looked like Karl Marx.
The one-off documentary is shot in Leech's distinctive hand-held camera style and features the first emotional encounter between the Mosque's charismatic young communications manager and a distraught sister of one of the three Bethnal Green schoolgirls who flew out to join Isis jihadists in Syria.
"When we meet a work of art, there's something about that encounter that isn't fixed in time, but rather, it unfixes time: the shaft opens.
There is added spice to the encounter because if the Australians do win they are bound to head the medal table for sailing.
Not only was it Berger's first encounter with Wrynose and Hardknott, but it was also the first and last time he overtook someone on the stretch of road.
