As we approached, a huge figure loomed over our youngest, talking rapid-fire in that gravelly baritone.
But he talks rapid-fire, with absolute confidence and the unsentimental world view of a laboratory scientist.
For the next 45 minutes, the handsomely-haired Fonz talked rapid-fire about producing, growing up in Hamilton, liking dark things, and on and on.
Then she led him on a tour, talking in rapid Spanish.
When he was a small child, something about his eyes would cause elderly relatives to choke up and begin talking in rapid Yiddish about a long-lost uncle named Shmiel, who had a wife and four daughters, all unaccounted for.
So it was initially rather odd to be in the Purcell Room on London's South Bank, in front of an audience who had paid good money to be there, to be talking about rapid cognition, social epidemics, mavens and connectors, in fact all the things that have made Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Gladwelll".
Asked about his new strategy, he refused to comment on job cuts or say branch closures were inevitable but talked about rapid growth of digital channels.
He talked in rapid fire with breaks of giggles, standing by the counter near the trading cards and drinking a beer.
The gruff Yorkshireman in his Fifties marches into The Independent's office requests an oversized coffee, helps himself to a sandwich and proceeds to talk at rapid speed (through mouthfuls of egg roll) about art and his ongoing feud with Banksy.
(Policy debate, which is characterized by almost incomprehensibly rapid talking, has long been a male preserve).
By now, she is talking in a rapid stream of French and her bobbed hair – which I'm realising is a helpful barometer of her internal mood – is getting increasingly animated, springing up this way and that, so that Reza has to brush it out of her face.
