To An Old Friend

When I was twenty two I met a lad three years younger than me, who somehow seemed a wee bit older. An ex Met cadet who’d pitched up in the same police accommodation as me and a load of other emigres who’d joined Strathclyde Police and been posted to the city. 

A boy from a tiny village outside Thornhill who nevertheless had the patina of someone who’d been about a bit, but that was maybe just projection, as until that point I hadn’t. He was in any case a funny, intelligent lad with impeccable taste in music and a fondness for beer, and for that I was in. 

Close friends for eighteen years, he was at both my weddings and I at both of his. I was best man at his first and his mother officiated at both his and my second. In earlier years we hill walked, went to gigs, got pished a lot and went harem skarem about the west of Scotland on our motorbikes. We later shared an epic journey through France travelling the length of the country and back again. He was motorbike daft. I particularly recall a death defying manoeuvre over a hump backed bridge into a blind bend in Dumfrieshire that had me thinking he had the gift of second sight, until he confessed later he’d just trusted to luck. I cursed him up and down for that, but it’s imprinted on my mind still, his CBR600 cranked right over at ferocious speed, his head down behind the screen, knee out. Fearless, and maybe just a wee bit mental. 

There were many days out in the hills, he was in the mountain rescue team, but I remember especially a climb of Buchaille Etive Mor when we reached the base of the hill and he said…

‘The real man route or wee lost boy crying..?’ 

Of course we went the ‘real man’ route, a perpendicular ascent of the north face, passing with a casual ‘hi’ a group of young couples roped up and wearing helmets who looked wide-eyed as we free climbed the steep rock to the top. I’ll never forget that climb and the feeling of empty space beneath and around me, Rannoch Moor stretching out before us in all its glorious desolation. Every time I drive through Glencoe I look up at that mountain and think of him. 

He had a quicksilver wit, like an elusive kingfisher spark on a sunlit river, a speed of thought that could outwit you, but cut a wee bit as well. As if light speed had by-passed reticence, but he was brave with it. He hated pomposity back then, like the time in a Brodick hotel with a small party of snooty English folks in ‘90 who patronised and sniggered as we watched Scotland go one down against Switzerland, only for Scotland to make an epic comeback. So he aped their comments back and we both took the piss so much they left defeated, and we staggered back in triumph to the tent we’d pitched by a burn up the road from the hotel; Dean illuminating the way with an old petrol lighter. Waking up to midges and bacon rolls, climbing Goat Fell with massive hangovers, both of us incongruous in our biker and combat jacket at the top. So many memories. But mainly it was talking rubbish, sharing the events in our lives, confiding our worries, or putting the world to rights over a beer. Like you do with a close pal. 

Lives lived in parallel. Our shared accommodation in Oxford Street to police flats in Shawlands, the new suburbs of East Kilbride and back to Glasgow’s Southside, via a residence in my Queens Park flat, where we lived like the odd couple for a year. It seemed that the fates would forever hold us in a familiar orbit.

Sadly, fate dealt us an unexpected hand and we gradually grew apart. A subtle distance grew between us and the dynamic changed, until a light bulb moment told me it was time to let go. As ever, it’s a mixture of the things said and unsaid; hard to say what causes the most damage. That’s life, no ill will, but boy it was sore. 

Life goes on doesn’t it? You think of your friend from time to time. Anecdotes of a previous life surface in odd moments when you think you’ve got a funny story to tell and your old friend inevitably features in the adventures you’d shared, places you’d been, something funny said, or a turn of phrase. And in that way the friendship is kept alive in the retelling. Until a message out of the blue tells you the thing you least expect. 

That my old friend, from what now seems another life, in another world, has passed away in this. 

He loved life, loved music and the outdoors. I have him to thank for being a part of so many good things and, during a large part of my life, my dearest friend.

RIP Dean. You’ll be very missed indeed.

#friends #life #love