28th of January 2024
Today would have been my old friend Alan’s 40th Birthday, and it felt appropriate to say something publicly. Eventually the stories of all our lives will fade into obscurity, but as far as I can, I’ll keep the best of his going. I will be somewhere up a mountain in Chile, creating some of my own stories, but today will be a day to remember Alan.
I still think about him regularly. Who would he have become? What would our relationship look like now? What could we have taught one another? The circumstances of his death are not something I dwell on, and in the spirit of keeping this light, I won’t say much about it here, either. However, I will always take the opportunity, when speaking about this, to encourage anyone who is feeling low, or knows some who might be, to talk. The legacy he has left me is to not take no for an answer when someone is so clearly in need of help – there will be better days ahead and there is always a route through.
Not long after he died, a number of us organised for a tree to be planted in Victoria Park, close to our first home in London. Knowing I wouldn’t be around today, I went to see the tree the day I left. The beech (it turns orange in winter) is doing marvelously.
Alan was 6 ft 5[1] and broad, with Inspector Gadget limbs; bright orange hair and pale skin that joined up into one enormous freckle under the slightest exposure from the sun. He was deep of thought and acerbically funny – one of the brightest people I’ve ever known. But as our old economics teacher said to me over coffee after he’d died ‘he never quite worked out how to master his intellect’, or to use a motoring metaphor – he couldn’t quite get the power down. So much talent, but with a fear of using it.
In 1995, at the national school swimming championships, Alan and I made up 50% of the relay team that progressed to the final – Alan employing his long levers on the backstroke, and I engaging my gluteus booty-mus on the butterfly. I can’t remember where we finished, but it wasn’t on the podium. The most memorable thing to happen that day, though, came afterwards in the changing rooms. A visibly distressed Alan loudly declared that ‘someone’s stolen my trousers and these [holding up a pair for all to see] are definitely not mine because they’re massive and they stink’. He marched out into the foyer in his blazer and boxers, to announce this troubling state of affairs to the gathered parents and teachers. His Mum swiftly and diplomatically pointed out that they had his name in them, and he’d best pop them on so we could all go home. Incidentally, I think that was the last time I went to Birmingham.
In the late Noughties – spurred on by a prolific goalscoring stint at Miami University – he converted himself from the goalkeeper of his youth (with a vampire-like aversion to crosses), to a more than useful centre forward[2] on the Sunday League pitches of London. I saw him score several goals that merited a much higher level; one in particular in the Cup against our nemeses – Shepherd’s Tuesday – on Regent’s Park. He rose inches above the leaping goalkeeper to nod in a far post header (on the end of a devilishly good ball from yours truly), that sent us into sudden death, and ultimately penalties. Both he and I scored in the shootout, we won and the crowd[3] went wild.
In between these two epoch-defining sporting moments, and before university, he went travelling around South America. I was not there to witness this, so my story is secondhand, but I will do my best to tell it as I have heard it from someone who was. After a night out – it may have been Chile, it may have been Peru – Alan returned to the dormitory he was sharing with his friends (and many others), with a lady. I believe she may have worked in a nightclub and have had a child (not with her, I should add, but this additional information that made it across the Atlantic to Chamonix was wildly exotic at the time). A private man with a strong moral compass (most of the time), and with no single rooms available, he proceeded to book out an entire dormitory for him and his new companion. We can only imagine what he must have said on throwing open the door to the vast room with a sea of empty bunk beds. I imagine it to have been something along the lines of – ‘do you like to be on top, or prefer the bottom?’ We can only hope. The piss-taking was relentless and went on for years. It has been hypothesized that this union may well have created a progeny – one that he would never have known about. I will keep an eye out for them on this trip; if they do exist, they will be hard to miss.
I know many of you will be in the Royal Inn on the Park in Victoria Park Village this weekend in his honour, organized by our friend Gavin. I shall raise a glass of maté, or beer if I can find one, to him and think of you all. With a great deal of love.
[1] It has been said 6ft 6. I have a feeling he’s going to grow an inch with every passing decade.
[2] Good feet for a big man etc.
[3] Two German tourists who’d got lost on their way to London Zoo.
Another Door In the Wall 