Summer In The City

Time Loops

No sun will shine in my day today 

The high yellow moon won't come out to play

I said darkness has covered my light

 And has changed my day into night, yeah

Where is the love to be found?

Won't someone tell me? 'Cause life 

Must be somewhere to be found 

Instead of concrete jungle 

Where the living is hardest 

Concrete jungle

Man, you've got to do your best, oh, yeah

Bob Marley

Concrete Jungle

Am at the Photographers' Gallery, where there is an exhibition of photographs by Dennis Morris entitled Music + Life which highlights Morris’ early documentary work in the multicultural neighbourhoods of post-war London but also captures the spirit of some of the most pivotal moments in 20th-century culture, from the soulful vibrancy of reggae to the rebellious energy of punk..... His candid photographs of Bob Marley, both on stage and off, along with the raw, chaotic world of the Sex Pistols, illustrate his unique ability to capture the personalities behind the music, (from the Photographers' Gallery website).

It's only a tenuous connection - a coincidence perhaps, but when Dennis Morris first hooked up with Bob Marley I also met the great man. On April 28, 1973, Bob Marley and the Wailers came to play in the Great Hall at Lancaster University on their Catch a Fire tour.  I was helping my friend Terry with his band, who were the support act that night, and we spent quite some time in the dressing room, with Bob and Bunny and Peter Tosh and their record playing and a lot of strangely pungent smoke.  Although they had yet to reach the heights of international stardom that was to come, they had a buzz about them, a confidence that they knew where they were going, and they were enjoying themselves.

Trouble was, that, although I was then a very keen amateur photographer, I didn't have my camera with me at the time [A minor oversight, no?  Ed].  I wonder now whether or not Dennis Morris could have been there?  He, like me, would have been a hanger-on, although he was already an accomplished photographer..... 

Here are some photos I took that year:

Brother and sister, Moss Side, Manchester

Moss Side, Manchester

Hattersley County Comprehensive School

Hattersley County Comprehensive School

Hattersley County Comprehensive School

And here is one Dennis Morris took of Bob in Jamaica a year or so later.....

Strange how time loops back and forth, with memory and coincidence entwined.....  

But:

It's all in the something or other.....

I emerge into the stupor of the London streets.  It is hot,  It's the city.  I need a loving spoonful:

Hot town, summer in the city

Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty

Been down, isn't it a pity?

Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people looking half dead

Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

There is indeed a stifled listlessness on the air:

Pollock's Toy Museum, once a colourful and entertaining spot in Fitzrovia (founded in 1956 in Covent Garden, it moved here to take over what had been an Italian cafe in 1969) is now fading into history, since it closed in 2023 (though still exists in pop-ups in Croydon and Leadenhall market) (Never mind the Pollocks?  Ed)

Even the mural in Whitfield Gardens (off Tottenham Court Road) seems exhausted.....

And Edward Burra's ladies waiting for a bus to Tate Britain are decidedly drained:

But at night it's a different world

Go out and find a girl

Come on, come on and dance all night

Despite the heat it'll be all right

Yes, well.... Maybe not? Better to keep cool with a little water feature:

Or take a pew  and relax with friends in a street cafe:

Cool town, evening in the city

Dressing so fine and looking so pretty

And babe, don't you know it's a pity

That the days can't be like the nights

In the summer, in the city

In the summer, in the city

The Lovin' Spoonful

Summer In The City

I wander back down past the now closed Photographer's Gallery, and then up Argyll Street, where only a couple of weeks ago Eva Perón entreated me not to cry for her silver (Not sure you quite understand?  Ed).  Apart from a bare handful of similarly dissolute campesinos or barrienses that night was mine.  Now the crowds are etched into a platinum frieze and gawp in silent homage:

Yes, the city has melted and been moulded into eternity. There is no where to escape to, but, wait a minute, sweet Cynthia (the moon goddess) Erivo calls me from above the rooftops (with Herbie Hancock on piano at the 2025 Grammy Awards):

Fly me to the moon

Let me play among the stars

And let me see what spring (summer?) is like

On Jupiter and Mars

In other words, hold my hand

In other words, baby, kiss me.....

Etcetera

Bart Howard

Fly Me to the Moon

Man, you've got to do your best, oh, yeah

Dublin c1973

London 2025

Private Passions

Dreaming of Private Passions
 

The composer and broadcaster Michael Berkeley has presented Private Passions on BBC Radio 3 for thirty years, inviting celebrities to choose and discuss various pieces of music.  The guests are all distinguished in their respective fields.  I will never be invited to take part, but it is fun to play the game, so here are my choices, with the proviso that, with the infinitude of music to draw on, any set could be influenced by any number of factors, ranging from the weather to the season to the vagaries of relationships.
 
Mozart was one of the first names I learned in music.  His Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was on one of the 78s we had when I was a child, with those chords ringing out from a teak wind-up gramophone that sat on the floor of our front room.  Later, when trying to learn the piano, I accompanied someone on the clarinet in a version of the second movement from his Clarinet Quintet.  I am not a pianist, but there is one opus I can just about manage, and there is a certain pleasure in making the notes that were composed so long ago come to life.
 
Mozart – Fantasia in D Minor, K 397 – Angela Hewitt
 
I wish I had progressed further with the piano, but with the excitement of the sixties I was drawn to the guitar.  And this perhaps is why my next choice is Bob Dylan.  I still have the Freewheelin’ LP which I bought on September 16^th, 1965.  And I still play Don’t think twice, it’s all right.....  Bruce Langhorne’s guitar adds to the effect, but it is Dylan’s confident and articulate farewell to a relationship that is so memorable.  It isn’t his greatest song, perhaps, but then given the breadth (and depth!) or his production over more than sixty years, which is?
 
Bob Dylan – Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
 
So, I played and sang through my teens, and I was in Dublin when the Dubliners were at their height, and I spent a memorable evening at the Old Triangle folk club where I met Luke Kelly. He had a wonderfully clear, controlled voice and as he closed his eyes, tilted back his head and let flow streams of perfectly balanced ballad history the place fell silent.  This is a beautiful song, written by Phil Coulter, which, despite being steeped in Ireland’s contemporary history, touches my own past in my imagination.  
 
The Dubliners featuring Luke Kelly – The Town I Loved So Well
 
I grew up to the Beatles, and they were absolutely a part of everyone’s life in the sixties. I sat though A Hard Day’s Night twice when it came out and hung on their every appearance on TV.  John Lennon had the edge, for me, and on the day he died, some friends and I were involved in a car crash (in Italy) and it seemed that the lights had gone out.  This song is an early one and is perhaps typical of the sixties where many pop songs were about holding hands or dancing or falling in love.  It is perhaps significant, however, that one of his last recorded songs was entitled Woman – I guess some of us grow up?
 
The Beatles – Girl: Rubber Soul
 
On April 28, 1973, Bob Marley and the Wailers came to play in the Great Hall at Lancaster University.  I was living and working in Manchester at the time, but went back up to Lancaster (where I had a toehold) for weekends and this was a great night.  There was something quite new about this music.....
 
Bob Marley and The Wailers – No Woman, No Cry
 
Later I moved to Sheffield and would drink in the pubs down West Street on a Saturday night, and one had a juke box with Rod Stewart’s version of What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me), and the song touched something within me, (though I didn’t listen).  My wife Amanda loved him too, and this recording of Have I told You Lately that I Love You? played her out at her funeral.
 
Rod Stewart – Have I told You Lately That I love You?
 
In 1976 I was appointed to teach at St George’s English School Rome, where my adult life took shape.  And as time went by, I picked up the guitar again and formed a folk group with a friend and some of the students and we performed concerts for Amnesty International, involving my guests Adrian Mitchell, Roger McGough and then Adrian Henri, and with others at the Folk Studio and The Fiddler’s Elbow.  They were good days, but I also became interested in Italian music, and history and I visited many churches and monasteries throughout Italy and learned about Palestrina. 

 

 
Palestrina - Missa Papae Marcelli – Sistine Chapel Choir, Massimo Palombella
 
I also went to the Opera in Rome and ‘discovered’ the joys of Verdi and Puccini. And somehow this led back to Mozart. I had a journalist friend who insisted we went to see Joseph Losey’s film of Don Giovanni, in which Kiri te Kanawa played Donna Elvira.  Later on, when we had moved back to the UK, I ran a school boarding house and Kiri’s son Tom was one of my charges.  On Friday, 20^th June, 1997, Amanda and I were invited to see Kiri at a gala performance at Hampton Court, a wonderful evening, with champagne in the dressing room after the show.  
 
Mozart – Cosi Fan Tutte - Soave sia il vento – Kiri te Kanawa.
 
The supporting artist that night was Andrea Bocelli, and as Amanda was particularly taken with him, the music we played to introduce her funeral was La Voce del Silenzio.
 
Andrea Bocelli – La Voce del Silenzio
 

E chi ho tanto amato

Dal mare del silenzio

Ritorna come un'onda

Nei miei occhi

E quello che mi manca

Nel mare del silenzio

Mi manca sai molto di più…

 
When I lived in Italy, I learned the language, and loved the life, and music was all around.  I particularly liked Francesco de Gregori and his friend Lucio Dalla, and more recently got hooked on a version of Alice, with Ligabue.
 
Francesco de Gregori, featuring Ligabue – Alice
 
As a counterpoint to this romanticism (which I acknowledge is a weakness) J S Bach is another of the masters to whom I listen again and again.  But......  How does one choose?  ‘Cello suites (as my brother Simon played at our mother’s funeral)? Organ works (my father and grandfather sometimes played these)?  Piano works (as I still try to play)?  

That is the difficulty.  And while I don’t really understand it, I can immerse myself in St John Passion and let it wash right through me.  The Matthew Passion, the Cantatas, etc, they all fill my mind with temporary glory, but I think St John is the best.

 
J S Bach – St John Passion – BWV 245 - Ruht Wohl, Ihr Heiligen Gebeine: The Choir of New College Oxford, Collegium Novum, Edward Higginbottom 
 
And now, in a different vein, I include a song by John Prine, about whose sharply witty and humanely warm lyrics I knew nothing before his untimely death in 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic.  But his last song, written and recorded only shortly before his death helps me whenever I think back over all the private passions of my life.  And it is also one I have learned to play, perhaps as a counterpart to the earlier Dylan track.
 
John Prine - I Remember Everything
 
And another song which is quite a different thing, though also strongly emotional.  Elton John was not an artist I ever felt close to, but he is music, and some of his songs are inevitably a part of the backing tracks of our lives.  Your Song is a sweet example of how he, and his associates, captivated us in the ‘70s.  Pop music has an enormous reach, and in certain ways it is the twentieth century’s answer to all the opera house excitement in the days of Mozart and Puccini et al....
 
Elton John – Your Song
 
In closure, I would have chosen either Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia, an extraordinarily enduring work which a friend introduced to me when we were first at Lancaster University, or for The Symphony No. 9 in E minor, From the New World, Op. 95, B. 178, composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1893, partly because it was one of the first LPs my brother Simon bought to play on our ‘modern’ record player, and also because, a year or more since the death of my wife, I am now entering a new world, and that sense of entering fresh territory excites me and gives me hope.

 

However, the music which I would like to fade away with, is that of Chopin.  Having visited the rooms in Vallombrosa, in Mallorca, where Chopin and Georges Sand spent an uncomfortable winter in 1839, I continue to wonder at the extraordinary melodic creativity that these pieces offer us.  And at the profound melancholy that sometimes settles upon me.  I just wish I could play it!
 
Chopin - Nocturne in G Major, Op. 37 No. 2 – played by Maurizio Pollini
 
 
All these pieces could be anyone’s choices, though anyone could choose infinite varieties of others. It’s a game.  I feel bad about leaving out so many artists and songs (where are Joe Cocker - You Are So Beautiful; Dolly Parton - I Will Always Love You;  Merle Haggard - That's The Way Love Goes;  or Sandy Denny - Who Knows Where The Time Goes.... just for examples?)  

It's just a game.  

But ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man......

 

Richard Gibbs

May 3rd 2025

 
 
 

For comradeship

Life and death and so on......

David Craig with Shep, the Lake District, c1984

When I was a teenager I didn't think I would live beyond twenty-five: don't ask me why. I don't think I had any idea why at the time, and I certainly can't think of one now.

But since I have passed my allotted three-score years and ten, I think I have proved myself wrong (and not for the first time....)

Anyway, I am getting used to the idea of death now, as there is a lot of it about, even though my first experience was probably when Tiddles didn't come back from the Vet (which would have been around 1961 or so) and then when two of my budgerigars were found face down on the sandpaper with terminal dehydration.

Since those fateful days a succession of grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, friends and pets have taught me that when you're dead, you're dead. Absolutely. Brown bread.  

So I wasn't exactly shocked the other day when I rang my old friend and mentor, David Craig, and learned, from Anne, his widow, that he had died last November. It was sad news, certainly, and I was very sorry I had not known in time to pay my respects at his funeral, but since the last communication I had had from him was a Christmas card in 2020 that said it would probably be the last he would send..... I was not  completely surprised.

Indeed, I had a sense that he had been preparing for his demise for some time. In 2013 he wrote to me that We're nae deid yet (an Aberdeenshire saying).... and in 2018 he sent a card saying We're both very old now, but not too bad in our minds - I think..... In fact I saw them at Easter that year on my way to spend a couple of weeks volunteering for the RSPB on the Mull of Galloway, and they were pretty good (despite the odd grumble).

I first encountered David when he lectured on the poems of Bertolt Brecht in 1969, my first year at Lancaster.  This was something of an epiphany for me and Coal for Mike still resonates - for comradeship.

For more of the story, and atmosphere, of Lancaster in those troubled years, please see: 

https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2018/05/lancaster-affairs.html 

I got to know David, and Jill, his then wife, quite well in my second year, and better still in my third year when he took over the Creative Writing module from Frank Goodridge.  He was a patient and thoughtful teacher.  Whatever drivel I produced was treated with respect and so it was with some excitement that when I wrote to him from Italy in 1983 saying I was thinking of returning to the UK to take a Master's degree he replied immediately, inviting me to take his MA in Creative Writing.

And so it came about.  Amanda and I lived in Burton in Lonsdale, and on occasions I would walk to visit David at his home in Burton in Carnforth, wading across the Lune on the way.

We had a great year, with workshops with the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro and Bernard MacLaverty, and weekends in the University's farmhouse high on the shoulder of Ingleborough above Clapham.  We went on a day trip to Sellafield, which, in a letter to me in January 2013, he recalled.  I had sent him a paper copy (he struggled to read my pieces on the computer) of  my blog about my paternal grandfather's experiences in the First World War: (https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2012/11/remembrance.html).  He replied:

He continued: Among all your pieces it is the Vatican banker/Timon (https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2012/08/timon-of-athens-divine-power-of-money.html) and now your grandfather's diary that have impressed me.  The others have struck me as well short of what you can do -  as rather old-fashioned magazine fillers, without enough personal centre, or unexpected information, or indelible imagery.  Excuse my being hard to please; I'm assuming you'd rather candid opinions than vague courtesies.....

We remained friends..... It was his candour and honesty that made him such a fine man.  

And I wasn't alone in being told I was generally lightweight; in his piece on Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks for the London Review of Books in September, 2015, David wrote: The rest of the book – described on the dust jacket as ‘a field guide to the literature he loves’ – seems to me less valuable, less significant..... Macfarlane’s book is different from the work of such writers as Jim Crumley, Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey. Where they stay with a region or a species for long enough to sink into it and pass, as nearly as can be, inside it, he veers from one writer or locale to another.

David was an excellent writer.  I have just re-read Native Stones, his 1987 book about climbing.  As Jonathan Raban said, This is no more a book "for" mountaineers than Moby Dick is a book "for" whale fishermen.  

As David explains, I am a middling sort of club climber at the flickering age of fifty-four, but, as he goes on to say, his approach lies in what are now the back dales and easier-angled crags.  My climbing grew late out of a lifelong fascination with nature, consciously escapist and very much concerned with the secretion of poetry and expressive prose.

I can hear David's soft, Aberdonian, voice in every sentence of this book, and his spare prose is a joy to read:  Dow Crag and the Old Man of Coniston stand up in the north-west as we look from our bedroom window and Dow's gullies show clearly in snow, white veins on black, Great Gully and Easy Gully slanting between the buttresses..... This is a deceptively simple sentence, but manages to pinpoint two locations, and steer us to see one through the eyes of a gentle, enthralled couple in their bedroom, who can precisely name distant features of the wintry landscape with affection and awe.

Two years after Native Stones was published, David wrote me a long letter in his slightly difficult longhand, in which he recounted the death of his beloved Shep (pictured at the head of this piece on a day when we walked in the Lake District). Talking of Shep, we had to have him killed in July. We'd always said that if his legs went and he had to drag himself around, that would be it - nothing left for him but a poor life we wouldn't want to live ourselves..... So we nerved ourselves to the euthanasia at last - took him to the vet at Kirkby, whom he knew well - he shaved his foreleg, slid in the needle, as we hugged him - stillness - absolute stillness - then a profound sigh, and another, as the very last air went from his lungs.

David's last book, Paradise and Wilderness,  was published in 2019 and is his own selection of poems from his writing life. A note on the back cover states that David, was born in Aberdeen - 'the granite city'.  many of the poems are uncompromising when tackling the inhumanity of man.  But alongside, there are poems of family and relationships that are sensitive, tender and ultimately hopeful that human kind can make this a better world.

I hope that he won't mind me quoting from this collection?  It is hard to choose a few lines, but perhaps the last stanza of Old Man Blues (2) fits here well enough....

A much worse hell, would be to lengthen out his days

Behind a screen of sound-proof one-way glass,

And see his dear survivors playing and talking,

Cooking their meals.  You wave and call.

They ignore you, they know you're dead,

You don't. And none of this can happen, 

Since there is neither hell nor heaven at all,

Only an infinite richness

On which the sun sets, moments after it rises.

As I said at the beginning, there's a lot of death about, from the terrifying accounts of torture and murder in Ukraine, to the vast numbers of victims of the pandemic, to the more natural passing of friends and family.  Having called paramedics to my wife's bedside this morning on the suspicion that she might have had a stroke, we live with the prospect all the time.  Some say that we are the only species with foreknowledge of death, though having noted solitary miserable birds outside the social limits of their normal flocks, I don't subscribe to such elitism.

As Roy Eldridge once said, No matter how hard you try, you can't get out of this world alive.  I am grateful for my life, so far, and for the fact that it involved the comradeship of David Craig.

And if ever any of my writing touches a chord, or is at all effective, that is quite possibly due to the mentorship of David Craig.

Requiescat in pace, Dave.....  Thank you.

David Craig

CRAIG David 1932-2021 Scholar, writer and poet. Died peacefully at home on 2nd November surrounded by family. Dear companion, friend and beloved husband to Anne. Father to Marian, Peter, Donald and Neil. Grandfather and stepfather. Funeral 17th November, 12 o'clock, at Dalton Woodland Burial Ground, Dalton Hall, Burton in Kendal.

Published, in The Westmoreland Gazette, on 11th November 2021

David's obituary can be read at:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/24/david-craig-obituary?CMP=share_btn_link

In Memoriam G L Webster 09/03/1948 - 12/04/2021

We are glad you passed this way.....

G L Webster, Trajan's Forum, 1981

Sometime last autumn, when we weren't quite locked down, I was in a London street, and my friend Lindsay Webster rang me. He asked how I was, so I burbled on about my aches and pains and how life was tough, etc, and then I asked how he was..... Not so good....  He had been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer.....

The train has left the station....

Last Monday morning, April 12th, he died. He was just 73.

Kirkby Hall

I met Linds in Sheffield, in the late sixties.  He was at University with my older brother, and he was one of a small group of friends sharing a fondness for beer and curries, amongst other things.  

Linds and my bro, Simon, in Howarth.  We had a running joke about the exchange of cash. No idea why....

Over the ensuing years we met regularly, though sometimes in a fog, here, and there.  At our home, where my younger brother fondly remembers his signature raincoat, and in Kettering and environs, where he lived and worked, as a teacher, firstly at Tresham College and latterly at Brook House College, Market Harborough.

We made many trips together, including an early morning drive over the Pennines from Sheffield to Lancaster, empowered by bacon butties and mugs of tea from all-night cafes; and a particularly frenetic visit to Paris in the early seventies, fuelled by absinthe and steak tartare.

During a visit to Palestrina, with another great friend, Antonio, in 1981.  Note the raincoat.....

In 1980 he attended my alma mater in Lancaster for a Master's degree, and I recall waking him there with the snap and fizz of a can of beer - we had a common interest in the intellectual qualities of alcohol - and then subsequently, in '81 he came to visit me in Italy, at Christmas time, where we explored the delights of Ancient Rome and then, with a rented car, the wines and spirits of Siena, where, after a bitterly cold evening in the Campo, he barricaded the hotel door against imaginary pursuers, only to find, in the morning, that the door opened outwards.

After that he was particularly anxious not to miss his flight home, so I accompanied him to Rome Ciampino airport, and he took off in the hope that a beautiful Polish girl would be waiting for him back home.  After taking a taxi from Luton airport, he found that he was indeed in luck, and not long after he and Anna married, to enjoy forty years of life together.

Ten years ago, Linds and I began a series of July excursions, fitting in a few days walking and a few nights beering between the end of term and either a holiday with Anna or one of his many journeys to the Far East or Asia Minor to recruit students for his college.  

Our first such adventure, in 2011, was to Lindisfarne, which I then commemorated in a blog piece which ended thus.....

The Holy Island of Lindisfarne’s name originates as the island of the people from Lindsey or Linnuis (OE Lindesege) which was the name of a small Anglo-Saxon kingdom, which lay between the Humber and the Wash, absorbed into Northumbria in the 7th century.  The name Lindsey itself means the 'island of Lincoln' which derives from the fact that it was surrounded by water and was very wet land and had Lincoln towards its south-west corner.  A fitting name all round. (The picture shows old friend Lindsay thinking about St Aidan, and the dangers of water.)

The following year we stayed in Blakeney, Norfolk, and walked (some of) the Norfolk Coast Path.  It was not the first time we had visited here, as this next photo reveals - a youthful Linds near Wells-next-the-sea - so many years ago now that I don't recall the details, except that he had 'borrowed' a tiny cottage and it was only in the early hours that we discovered that the owners were not entirely aware of the arrangement.....

In 2013 we ventured to Suffolk; in 2014 to the Peak District, where our advancing years began to show ascending Jacob's Ladder, and even more on the subsequent trail down a very rocky gulley. 

 The year after that we stayed in Stratford-upon-Avon, took in Volpone (in a hospital bed) and wandered on the Malvern Hills, checking out Elgar's cottage and his last resting place. In 2016 it was the Cotswolds, where we followed in the feetsteps of Laurie Lee. 

2017 had us in Leeds and the Yorkshire Dales, on the trail of J B Priestley. In 2018 we stayed in the glory of Tracey Emin's Margate, breathing in the dust of T S Eliot, and then, in 2019 we were in Essex, savouring the salt at Great Maldon but also admiring John Constable's country.

The pandemic blew us off course in 2020 and that, sadly, is that, for now, though in addition to the July sorties there were also meetings in London, Manchester, Sheffield, and in the vicinity of his home town of Kettering. 

 

Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds

Much of all this was informed, subtly, by Lindsay's erudition.  He was well educated - a classmate had been David Hare - and his relationship with professor William Empson was not solely steeped in spilt drinks.  Indeed, on March 9th this year, Linds wrote to me (with reference to something I had written):  Before his annual poetry reading we used to take him out. Me, "Prof. Empson, can I get you another drink?". Him, "Another. You're politely reminding me it is my round."  Double gin and peps for all followed.  Later as he stumbles over the threshold of a Chinese restaurant he puts his hand on the head of a bemused Chinese child saying, "I wish I could tell you something but you know it all already".  Needless to say the reading was always entertaining if at times difficult to follow.  I gave a copy of his poems to someone inscribed with a note.  When she asked him to sign the book, "Someone has already signed it.  Are you sure you need me to do so?"  !  His shadow provides lasting shade.

Linds himself was very well read, though his interest in international affairs and politics was lightly worn.  We would walk and talk, and apart from his engaging relations of adventures in China, Nigeria or Kazakhstan, he would always be ready with a quotation or reference to literature stored accurately for appropriate use.

I should also record that Linds was a proper European. His father was an upstanding Englishman. His mother a resolute Irishwoman.  His wife a native of Poland.  

But behind that Linds was a true cosmopolitan. There were no boundaries. As a youth he had worked on a Kibbutz in Israel, and travelled in North Africa and the Middle East. In later years he went on numerous recruitment trips for his colleges to many countries, from Viet Nam to Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, often extending his trips at his own expense to explore the culture and history of the region.  (And, quite recently, giving helpful advice to my daughter before she herself went to work in Azerbaijan....)

Sadly this is over now.  His store of knowledge and anecdotes of crazy hospitalities are archived.  

But all is not lost. 

While it is sadness crystallised to lose someone, especially if it is sooner than expected, we must know it will happen to all of us, and what remains is the love we had all along.  We remember the kindnesses, the laughter, and, in some cases.... the drinks.

I was going to see Linds again in London when lockdown eased.  Anna was planning to bring him to see us in Norfolk for some sea air and we would have met again.  We have to accept this cannot now happen, but instead we have to reflect on how much we enjoyed what was allowed to us all.

The process of dying is the difficult part. But, whatever faith one has, death itself shall have no dominion. What is done is done, and everlasting peace is the gift of the deceased.  

{I have tried here to paste in a video of some pictures taken on trips with Linds over the years.  It may well not work for all, if any, so apologies if not....}

I have been privileged to have had good friends. Between us we will suffer individual deaths, but we will forever share the laughter and twinkling memories of lives that have not entirely been wasted....

With apologies to both Luke Kelly and Michaél O'Caoimh, I quote a few lines from Luke, A Tribute, sung by Christy Moore.  I met Luke Kelly in Dublin when I was a very young thing, and heard him sing.  He left a deep impression on me, and when I heard this song, some time after he died (in 1984) I couldn't help but weep.  

The sentiment still applies to Luke, but transfers just as well to my dear friend, Lindsay:

I still can clearly hear your voice

Though your time with us is o'er

For memories are all we have

When we think of you today

Your name we'll always honour, (Linds),

We're glad you passed this way

Somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales.  Pies, mushy peas, and pints of ale.....