In 1983, as previously confessed in this blog, I was living in east Oxford grinding away at my thesis. One of the other post-grads I got to know was Paul (a Pole with a German passport), who was studying at Wolfson and, in theory, writing a thesis on Hölderlin. We became friends. He had a finely-tuned East European sense of irony (something I’d previously experienced in Russia) and saw that in every tragedy there is usually an element of farce and vice versa. I tickled him with my one-liner, “Life is like a school dinner: it’s vile, it’s disgusting and there isn’t enough of it”.

We both appreciated black humour. He joked that going to Tesco’s at 6pm on a Saturday (in those days supermarkets shut on Sundays) reminded him of home: all those empty shelves. He observed that the expression “to sweep something under the carpet” could never have caught on in Poland, because not only did few Polish people have carpets, but if they had, they’d think that their primary purpose was for covering up dirt. He was keen, too, on the corniest of puns. Once we “Polished off” a bottle of bison grass vodka. On another occasion it was Finlandia: “It said Finnish on the label, so we did.” That sort of thing.

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I had too many girlfriends, whereas Paul didn’t seem to have one – not that he wasn’t interested in girls, but none seemed to have really taken his fancy. It was odd, because he was tall, slim and handsome, as well as multi-lingual and multi-talented. His principal interest was the cinema, and he spent a lot of time with like-minded people. Eventually he packed in his thesis, like so many before and since, and sped off to Italy to teach English. It amused him that none of his students seemed to notice, or perhaps even care, that he had a Polish name. His letters to me suggested that he found Italian women, and the way Italian society just about held itself together, interesting.

Italy is a country of experts… he wrote, with characteristic irony

In June 1984 the peripatetic Pole returned to Oxford from Turin. We drank vodka into the wee hours. A little later his mother, an English teacher almost crippled by her former career as a ballerina, came for a brief visit. She seemed a lovely and dignified lady.

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A few weeks later I landed my first job in London and off I went, full of misplaced hope and excitement. Paul was also heading for The Smoke. He found a house in “Befnall” Green belonging to a film director by the name of Tomasz Pobóg Malinowski; we could stay there while Tomasz was away for six months in Poland. So that September we moved into Beck Road, which, my diary tells me, was to set us back £50 a month, each.

Most of the street had been annexed by an artists’ housing association. (It was “Bohemian”, not to say pretentious. The Miners’ Strike was going full swing and everyone we met seemed to be a fan of working-class hero Arthur Scargill.) I met some interesting and talented people, like Rachel Portman and Mikey Cuddihy and Helen Chadwick, but I never properly fitted in. Probably because I can’t draw or make films, or have ever wanted to.

Mikey (at that time Paul’s girlfriend) sent me this Christmas card: he’s on the right.

The autumn of 1984 had been fine and warm but the following winter was the coldest in London since 1963; the house was literally freezing cold and we were reliant upon a single portable gas heater.

Disconcertingly, Paul turned up at 3am on 3 January from Wuppertal, where he’d been visiting his mother in hospital. I woke up to think we were being burgled. Living with Paul was a mixed blessing. He was a lovely guy: funny, warm and generous, but untidy and forgetful. (Mind you, I was not without fault. On one occasion I came home late and grabbed a glass of water that happened to be sitting on the kitchen table; in the morning I discovered I had drunk Paul’s contact lenses). To be fair, he had a lot on his mind and he was highly creative; whereas I got bogged down in menial tasks like putting out the bins and remembering to buy food and bottled gas for the heater. (I become obsessed with physical neatness whenever my emotional life is a shambles, which it certainly was at that time.) We were both quite intense and worked long hours but, intellectuals or not, we used to relax by giggling at Minder and Only Fools and Horses. We fantasised about casting Nicholas Lyndhurst in a film – surely he could not have commanded much of a fee. When funds allowed, we would go to Daquise in South Kensington and splurge on Polish grub for next to nothing, or head to the Cat and Mutton round the corner for a traditional East End lock-in. Then it was a dangerous dive; today it is a noted gastropub in super-trendy London Fields.

While our teeth chattered in Beck Road, Paul would write pieces for an excellent (but now defunct) magazine Stills, edited by Nicolas Kent who, like me, had been at Queen’s. I contributed the occasional short film review, whilst Paul was despatched overseas to interview Miloš Forman or Federico Fellini or Krzysztof Zanussi. His big break came in February 1985 when he landed a General Traineeship with the BBC. By one of “those bizarre coincidences” he was soon working with Paul Campbell, virtuoso drummer in an Oxford band I’d played in a few years before, called One for the Wall. In due course the BBC somehow let him make documentaries, and he began to get noticed.

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The following anecdote gives an insight into Paul’s character. One fine evening, Wednesday 29 May 1985, we were at my new flat in Briarwood Road, Clapham in front of the TV to watch Liverpool vs Juventus in the Final of the European Cup. The match was being played at the run-down Heysel Stadium in Brussels. However, kick-off was delayed, and it soon became clear why… The death toll eventually reached 39. Everyone watching was shocked but it affected Paul to the extent that he had to rush off to the toilet to be sick. He could see that real people, albeit people that he didn’t know, were dying.

Paul is fiercely intelligent and articulate, but also a kind and gentle person

Some years later, after marrying Irina, Paul and his family moved from north London to Boars Hill, Oxford (an opportunity for more punning) so we saw very little of each other, although I followed his career with interest. His BBC documentaries continued to get screened. Then he won a BAFTA in 2000 for his first feature, Last Resort.

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In 2004 I went to a pre-release screening of My Summer of Love (the film that thrust Emily Blunt upon us), and finally had the chance to see Paul and congratulate him on his huge achievement. Another BAFTA followed. Then he moved to France.

In 2013 he moved back to Poland and made Ida, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

With Cold War (2018) – inspired by his parents’ passionate and self-destructive relationship – his reputation is established as one of the most talented auteur directors, along with Alfonso Cuarón, at work today. The awards are piling up and he has another Oscar nomination. I had the pleasure of seeing him again this week (for the first time in 15 years) at a Q&A session at the Curzon Bloomsbury. I had to remember that he’s no longer the German/English/French “Paul” we used to know him by, but Paweł Pawlikowski, as his parents intended. It suits him, and it sounds better too.

I still have his tennis racket, handed over in lieu of rent. Surely that must be worth something? All serious offers considered.