Games Holiday 2024

But what is the meaning of the word ‘Spam’?

I’ve made it, baby!

 I’m so popular now that i got my first piece of Spam in the comments. It’s marked a turning point in my career.

Um, Actually, it hasn’t. It hasn’t done anything of the kind. 

I thought I would be deluged, but no. 

Disappointment.

Spam ain’t what it was.

Adrian still eats this.

At least there’s still lots of young women with no clothes on who like my Instagram photos.

Life in a Cotswolds Farmhouse

It’s Wednesday evening. With the exception of being driven to Tescos, I haven’t actually left the farmhouse since arriving here on Friday. I don’t really do anything like the strategic wargaming or bored-games that everyone else seems to like. I ran a Mutant Crawl Classics game for 4 1/2 hours the other day. That was bonkers and hard-work. I was absolutely drained at the end.

In the game, the characters are living a stone-age existence in a world similar to Earth, the climate is tropical, the sun large and red, the sky a teal/turquoise and the moon is replaced by a large crescent over the horizon. The object of the game is a rites-of-passage where you must go to ancient fantastic places and retrieve artifacts, which can be as mundane as thermos flasks or as fantastical as plasma rifles. 

What could possibly go wrong?

The trouble with RPGs - you have to rehearse and revise and be on top of the entire story you’re running for that session or it can be crap.

Luckily no one wanted to play it again. 

Sometimes you can wing it and it will be great, but I have less confidence I’ll be able to pull that one off. I have less capacity to absorb information these days (it was never great)  and to recall said information on cue.

Went for a pub lunch on Thursday. I couldn’t work out the taste of the burger - it was either excessively salty or excessively burnt. 

I did some role-playing for an hour as Hubert H Humphrey as the precursor to a wargame that I wasn’t a part of. I enjoyed the role-playing though. 

In another D&D game I play an incredibly camp Bard who I’m trying to keep different from Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s fun. 

Traveller has a science-fiction setting in which I play an Australian doctor and wellness consultant obsessed with people’s nutrition, forcing Brussel sprout and mung bean smoothies on them at inappropriate moments. 

Spending a lot more time on my own. That’s just my nature nowadays though. 

Read the Saturday Times. That was a pleasure. Giles Coren, Janice Turner, James Marriott, and also the awful Gerard Butler, just because I can’t believe how truly awful he is.

Even The Times seems to be embarrassed about him, omitting the link to his column in the paper’s Comments section.

The literary critic hails The Shipping News by Annie Proux, a truly great novel bursting with flavour on every page. Nice to have my good taste confirmed.

We stay up late to recall past players and friends, some of whom are no longer with us in life, and others who were too obnoxious to be invited back. 

We try and decipher someone’s curmudgeonliness, then laugh at our own. 

Good times. 

We are a 14 yard skipful of neuroses.

I’m loving staying in bed. It’s much better than walking around looking for things to do. Just staying here so comfortable and warm with my thoughts. 

Oh well, I suppose I’d better be social…

Brix and Me

So I’ve been looking at videos of The Fall who I didn’t like very much. I first came across them at Maidstone College of Art sharing a house with some fine artists.

I saw an interview with Mark E Smith and at that moment the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen (I was 19) and that was Brix, his wife.

80s beauty

When she was in the band they were at their best.

Oh, the life we could have had.

So that was in a way, quite depressing.

Really pretty small blonde women with beautiful big smiles. Most of whom turned out were Jewish.

Do I have a type? I certainly did back then. 

It’s weird to think ‘that’s it‘ on the relationship front.

I don’t think I could have one anymore as it’s not fair on the other to burden them with the illness and also what do they get out of it?

And I just want to be left alone for hours at a time.

But I don’t think that last bit is anything to do with the illness. 😜

Mark E Smith and me

So I then watched lots of Fall songs and clips of interviews. I watched him eviscerate the ever fawning Lauren Laverne. I enjoyed that. 

Rediscovering through streaming sites or Youtube all that music we turned our noses up at or didn’t understand back in the day.

But he was needlessly rude and cruel to so many people, with fights on stage and a revolving door of band members.

What a diet of booze, fags and speed does to you.

He was a fascinating character. He didn’t sing but he could, he wasn’t a poet, but more of a performance artist. He was loyal to Salford, bitter about Northern industrial decline but also wallowing in the grime and depression of it, a tyrant to his band, a narcissist who cared nothing for people’s approval, a refreshingly original thinker who called things out not to toe the trend but because it was true as he saw it.

Self-destructive, charismatic, a one-off.

Charisma beats looks - which is what attracted Brix to him.

The world needs people like Mark E Smith.

Glad I never met him.

Smalltown Attitude

Maybe I should rename this blog. Sounds like a punk fanzine from the 80s.

Maybe it was.

Gossipy little places where people talk a thousand miles an hour about people you don’t know and don’t care about. 

People’s lives often begin at home and end at the town or village’s boundaries.

And everyone’s mad at my age. Half given-up, half fed-up. Shaking your head in either despair or laughter.

God…

That’s what dreams are for, I guess. Me and Brix living the life…

…in Shepton.

I’m a thick bitch packing cake

Bloody Chickens

(WARNING TO ALISON: contains 1x F-bomb…)

I'm completely mad and should never be allowed near the general public. So say I.

Haunted by my past - scattergun memories make me wince with every one that lands. Like a flicked finger to the unmentionables.

Shouting out ‘Fuck off!’ which my parents are either too deaf to hear or miraculously - especially my mother who’s strictly adverse to swearing of any kind - ignoring.

I wasn’t even allowed to say bum as a kid, nor chuck stones into ponds where no one was lurking “just in case”.

Sounds mad now.

Because it is.

Increased Input

Re-subscribed to The Times (£1 a month for 3 months - they must be desperate, which in a way is good) but I've failed to read more than half of the editions.

I like the Saturday edition but The Sunday Times is a piece of shit. Completely different - like a bombastic, snobbish older uncle, there to embarrass you with its antediluvian outlook and Faragist waistcoat.

Ignorant, ludicrous, pompous.

So I can still read a newspaper. The downside is it's bloody depressing. News is almost always of the 'bad' variety. A new forest being planted doesn't quite have the gravity of bombs falling on families in Ukraine or the middle-east.

Already though, with the input of information - 'news' as it's often referred to - it's stimulating my brain enough to start writing.

What a fug I get myself into. Hitting the same thing on YouTube time and again. I need variety but it's difficult to know how to get it when there are only 3 choices available...

I just have the greatest taste in music…

Saying that I listen to a lot of great music (as do we all) although my taste is the best. No really, you must check out what I listen to. It really is better than yours.

Truthfully.

Lots of great jazz/fusion/Brazilian funk from the 70s - Banda Black Rio, Gilberto Gil, George Duke, and also rediscovering Gil Scott Heron and Roy Ayers, who I saw at Ronnie Scott’s many years ago.

Also a big fan of Lizzo, which inspired the title of this post. Big fan of Missy Elliott who I always found strangely beautiful and one of the best rappers of all time. She doesn’t get as much recognition IMO due to her sex.

And here are both of them in a conveniently packaged video promo!

Also like Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi, Domi and JD Beck, Esperanza Spalding and countless other geniuses.

I like music where musicians have conversations with other musicians - I guess that’s why I like jazz.

I want to hear bands - musicians. Original ideas.

I want there to be imperfect concerts in an age of computerised perfection.

Do you know they’re even auto-tuning Freddy Mercury’s voice on Queen re-releases??

It’s possible to like current music when you’re old but in the main you have to work harder for the good stuff as… Simon Cowell.

Yes, why have the chef’s special when you can have the Big Mac followed by the Mars Bar?

He probably doesn’t even listen to the stuff.

Saying that, Mars Bar were never good live.

Me and my non-sequiturs, Mrs!! 

What’s…out the window?

 That woman in her cardigans is walking past all the time. Bag over shoulder, hair tied up, wellingtons or boots. All weathers. Like a farmer, but not. She stares at the ground, always on a mission. She’s a strong walker - I’ll give her that. 

I spoke to her while walking Tomos. She could speak for England. 

She's pleasantly bonkers but I find it hard to get past the cardigans.

Ow! 

That lump under my right patella is rather too big now. It's been growing there for years. I occasionally acknowledge it. I don't want to bother anyone (doctors) with something as non-emergent as an uncomfortable growth, but that's what they said about Mount Vesuvius isn't it? All those Pompeiians.

Having a black desk shows up the dust somewhat. I need to dust it at least every hour.

It’s gotten really cold. Dark clouds. So windy too. My Mum swears it was never this windy in the past!

I call it Led Zepplin weather. Me with my Sanyo version of a Sony Walkman in the back of a Ford Cortina driving to Ystradgynlais in the early 80s - cold, grim, cloudy, and all the while listening to either Led Zep 4 or Houses of the Holy. 

Romantic, melancholic, hiraeth, Tolkein.

Love it.

Word of the Week!

‘Relatable’. As in “I can relate to that”. 

Like Rylan, bless him - all teeth and no brain. Hence him replacing the old fuddy-duddies who do.

How dare they know shit! 

Elite, arrogant, entitled!

But it’s also an annoying word as it doesn’t seem to have any synonyms. A bit like the word ‘impactful; which I first heard being used by a PR person.

Damn - it hasn’t replaced any word. It’s just new. And while I hate these words, I hate it more that I don’t know their equivalents, if they even exist at all!!!

Lord Alli and me

Before I aged horribly, in my 30s I was an attractive well-dressed office worker in central London.

I had hair and everything.

So much so that when I worked at a certain company people used to think I was gay. I mean, you have to be to dress like that!

Don't you?

Lord Alli was the chairman of that company. Always used to make a special effort to say hello. He used to say things like: “Are you taking the stairs or are you coming out with me?” In reference to the lift.

Er, the stairs.

He asked me once what I did in the company. I told him (it was relatively lowly) and he said “Well, I think we’ll have to do something about that Geraint.”

He’s now embroiled in the freebies scandal with the Prime Minister.

I remember he had his chauffeur running round London picking up and delivering presents to his 100 closest friends and the chauffeur who'd been employed by him for a number of years absolutely mortified that Alli had neglected to buy him one.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a man so hurt.

Alli was one of “Tony’s Cronies”. I always felt there was some kind of transactional nature to the guy.

Wow: if I could earn that kind of money!

He then elbowed out the CEO and went on a spending spree buying up millions of quidsworth of intellectual properties.

And then the crash of 2007 happened.

And that was the end of that company.

Just my thoughts.

One day I’ll tell you about Dom Joly.

My brain is numb

 Sertraline

Can't live with it; can't live without it.

It's the reason I don't get angry anymore. It's also the reason I don't get sad anymore. I still enjoy things. I feel bad for people who are suffering. 

But it was Mat's funeral the other day. And I didn't feel overwhelmingly sad.

I wanted to feel. But that part of my brain is just...inaccessible.

I've always found funerals odd. When my friend Jon passed away 30 years ago I didn't cry. It all just felt, unreal. That he's no longer there - that he's just gone.

I looked at the wicker coffin knowing Mat's body was in there. So tangible, feet away. 

Just wake him up. 

He can't be gone!

I was moved by Suzy's eulogy, and felt for brave Freya as she did her reading then came back and collapsed in tears on the pew. 

While Sertraline stops my anger, it also shuts down emotions I want to have - to be able to share that sense of grief with others. 

To feel pain.

I know it's in there. 

This is the down-side of the drugs. They top and tail your emotions so only a thinnish line in middle is available.

A single layer of lasagne with a thin coating of ragu and no béchamel sauce.

I daren't come off the stuff though as the flip side is insta-rage. 

It would just be nice to have the odd window.

The odd window

"Cranky-Pants! Cranky-Pants! Cranky-Pants!"

I have a cold. Don't come near me, not because I will spray you with mucus but because I will bite your head off. 

Actually, it's very minor, but these days we all have to isolate when we have colds don't we? Back in the day you just went to work and got on with it. 

When I worked as a banker mason in a workshop I got paid by the hour. 

Don't turn up: don't get paid.

It took me years to get over that mentality. When I worked at the BBC I couldn't believe how many days people had off ill, and it was never questioned. They'd be off one day - back the next with no discernible thing wrong with them.

Probably all the BAD drugs people did back then.

The worst part of me having a cold is how horrible I become. I bite the heads off of medium-sized dogs, and bark at people in the service industry as I can no longer understand or speak their language.

So I just stay in nowadays lest I get into a massive ding-dong with a sabre-toothed librarian or 16 year old cashier-ninja.

A woman I worked with many years ago used to call me "cranky pants" whenever I was grumpy, which was most of the time.

I'm not like that anymore due to all the GOOD drugs I take.

I'm bendigedig me.

The world is rubbish

Just watched Margaret Atwood talking about The Handmaid's Tale. 

She quoted William Gibson by saying the future is here but it's not evenly distributed. She wrote the Handmaid's Tale not as a science fiction but as a portentous work like 1984. 

I wrongly believed 1984 was Orwell's prediction of Britain's future, but it was an allegory of the Soviet Union and was just 1948 backwards - the year he completed it. 

So a lot of those sci-fi tales or fables take something prevalent in the NOW and then crank it up and place it in a seemingly utopian setting, which then reveals itself to be utterly dystopian.

Oh god, I'm starting to sound like a bloody art student.

I still can't understand why it's still neck and neck in the US elections. 

I don't understand why anyone thinking what Putin has done in Ukraine is justifiable.

Ditto with Israel carpet-bombing Gaza.

I know the world is a complex place, a mess of geopolitics, vested interests and bare-faced greed, but some things are just plain wrong.

As usual, I'll just blame the internet.

"You got to look it up." They say, as though everything on the internet justifies their version of events.

Information is not knowledge.

And it all contributes to me swearing very loudly, basket in hand, at the terrible pizza selection in Tescos.

As you were.

Who's demented now??

London comes to me...

Me old cor-blimey geezers came up from that London: Gerry and Allen. 7 hour round trip. They met the old folks who thought they were wonderful (they don’t know them like I do).

Dad brought his fishing flies in as Gerry is a keen fly-fisherman too. He also cornered Allen to talk about cars - Allen was driving some huge Mercedes SUV.

My Dad - 'The Chatty Welshman'!

When they first arrived I was slightly discombobulated seeing familiar faces in my home environment - does anyone else get that or is it just me? People in their contexts or out of their contexts? A bit like a wedding where all the people compartmentalised in different parts of your life come together. Like a rabbit in headlights - felt slightly unreal, dream-like.

We did the Lambeth Walk through Wells - saw the cathedral, Vicar’s Close and Bishop’s Palace. I think they liked Vicar’s Close best. 

'Mad' Allen Osborn and Gerry 'Chopper' Boyle

A couple of Chelsea Smilers later we had lunch at the S&P. It was great. Lots of good-natured swearing and laughter. And also comparing notes about living in the sticks and the wacko racist nutjobs who do little or certainly less, to disguise their bigotry.

Really nice to see them. Much appreciated. 

...and I go to London

Despite the lovely day, I slept very badly that night. I just couldn’t get to sleep with underlying stress about travelling to London and so forth, and then I woke up way too early. 

I used to feel like that when I was running masonry jobs, thinking everything would go wrong. Lost a lot of sleep over a number of years.

Fell asleep several times on the coach trip on the way up. Each time I jolted awake, thinking I was about to pee myself. Anyone else get that?

Oh, okay then...

Got to Hammersmith pretty much on time. The MC on the coach has thankfully stopped making that joke about Ebaying lost property. Got out and jumped on the tube, to go to Piccadilly Circus.

Nice afternoon - but I had a heavy bag in tow.

The fashions in London at the moment are completely underwhelming. Baggy faded jeans, earth-shatteringly horrendous baggy woollen cardigans, beards and dresses, and ultimately look like you can only afford to dress out of a jumble sale.

Zero-style.

Ugly, unflattering clothes.

I walked to The Ralph Lauren flagship store. I'd recommend anyone to go in there. It really is something else. Like an Ivy League university from the 1930s in London.

As with all things, they’ve stopped making the one thing I always bought. In this case I was after RL Sullivan jeans, Buitoni-fly and no stretch. They even had a cardigan I was tempted by - half-jacket half cardigan. It was in cotton silk. 

I know, I know. Too many buitoni but they’re not plastic and at least it’s not regular soft fluffy wool. More like a jacket really.

Yes, that's what I will tell myself. It's not a cardigan, it's a jacket! 

(Remembers being admonished by upper middle class family 25 years ago: "It's not a sauce Geraint! It's a jus!")

I know, I know. Only £549.

Great plastic-surgery disasters of Mayfair

Filler here, filler there; filler everywhere. The unfeasibly rich doing their utmost to reclaim their former beauty and paying the price for their vanity.

Narcissus with botox.

Some are so grotesque they look like they're wearing a plastic mask. Demonic.

Body dysmorphia - must be.

No, you look great. Honestly...

Wimbledonia

That evening I stayed with Sophie and her daughter Olivia who I hadn’t seen for years, and who is now a confident young woman. 

All the young adults I knew as kids now seem more mature than me.

We had a lovely evening. I slept for 2 hours when I got to Sophie’s as I was shattered.

We had an amazing Chinese meal from Good Earth - a London chain. Just astonishingly good quality.

I felt like sending it to the 2 Chinese takeaways in Wells to show them how it SHOULD be done, rather than the care-free slop they produce which they then puke into the plastic containers.

I heard Sophie leave around 7.30 am. I had a shower, Oscar the lovely 12 year old brown lab was unresponsive at the top of the stairs, then had a banana and a cup of tea and left. What a beautiful road - huge bay windows - and front gardens. A conservation area too. Must have been built in the 1910s. Mostly occupied by families it seemed.

I looked up the house prices on Zoopla. Wow. 

The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery

Got into Russell Sq and did my usual of going to Pret for breakfast. Always a ton of foreign students around. Sat there and watched the world go by and do its thing.

Prof Warren said while I may or may NOT have dementia, the Semantic Variant diagnosis I originally had was incorrect.

I said I felt slightly fraudulent - so do I have dementia or not? My behaviour certainly changed and I got crazy angry until the Sertraline kicked in. And I do have problems with elision of words. My brain fog is as real as ever and despite my neuropsych tests it's increasingly opaque. 

He assured me it’s nothing to feel fraudulent about. The hospital is all about anomalous cases and they want to put me in a PET scan as the last MRI scans have shown the atrophy in my lobes has STABILISED!

There is something going on and they want to get to the bottom of it. 

A PET scan will show more the workings of my brain rather than just its volume, but is subsequently also prone to more of an interpretation - such is the complexity.

I did my yearly neuropsychology tests and was told it was pretty much the same as last year’s - it certainly felt harder. More brain fog, less cognisance that I’d got the right answers, and subsequently less confidence. 

I felt I was giving a best guess rather than knowing I'd got the right answer.

So who knows what I've got? 

And that was it for another year.

 

Dust

That weird hinterland

I'm glad my last post about Mat went down well with those closest to him. I'm often told I'm too honest - say stuff that should remain unsaid. Too personal, too embarrassing to be shared. 

Maybe it's because some friends of mine when I was 18 said they didn't know me as I guess I didn't want to show any vulnerabilities. Since then I've tried to be more me. 

It's been a struggle, with my inclination to share the WRONG stuff.

(Apparently.)

At least I trod the correct path with the last post. Last thing I'd want to do is upset people, especially those who matter most to me. 

So now the wait for the funeral, which will be a huge affair. Mat was very popular. 

Mat wasn't a divisive figure in any way. He was very thoughtful, upfront and decent. He didn't suffer fools, but who of us do?

Tolerance? Mehhhh.

Funerals are weird things - Nervousness, sombreness, grief,  more grief, relief that that part of the day is over, then revelry - celebration of the life lived. 

The older I get the more I appreciate and understand the nature of funerals. There are many ways to deal with death - every culture has theirs. None of them I guess are 100% the correct answer, but at least they are a response and provide a collective grieving period, and a conduit for feelings and the many emotions, which is cathartic.

My world

...is shrinking ever more. Now I have 2 screens I would say I now only need half the space of my mancave. 

I've played over 600 hours of Baldur's Gate 3. That's a lot of hours. 

The other side of my room full of books and a nice chair to read in, is barely used. 

Perhaps I could rent it out?

The screens are too tempting. 

That's really rubbish. 

I'm also forgetting to write my diary every other night. Not that there's much to go in there, but pages are left blank. It's a catharsis thing as I never read them, but I have kept them all since 1986.

Philippa Perry in her book "How to stay sane" recommends keeping a diary and meditation. It's excellent advice, although I've dropped the meditation bit.

I let a friend of mine read my diary when I was at art college. She said "I wish I was you, Geraint."

She wasn't being sarcastic (I'm sure!), but I've always wondered what she meant by that.

I'm not reading anything either. I sat in a cafe to read "Vecna: Eve of Ruin" and read the first chapter. But it's taken me a week to get round to doing just that.

I am witness to certain faculties eroding.

On the upside...I completed my 5th or 6th run-through of Baldur's Gate 3 on the PC. Only 600 hours of my life has been spent playing this game.

Still, I'm a long way off Larry who has spent 7,650 hours of his life (10 and a half months) playing Lord of The Rings Online. 

There's a challenge...

Alchohol

The sad 60 year old sat at the bar embarrassing himself in his drunkeness, trying to flirt with the young bar staff and whom no one wishes to engage with.

The lost old guys who drink steadily from 11 till 4 everyday at Wetherspoon's. Resigned to their fates, they vacate their seats one at a time until they are entirely replaced by another group of unhappy old men.

I don't and I won't be any of those people.

I drank too much on Saturday night after a lovely evening with Nerys and Ben. I just stopped in at The White Hart on the way home and had probably 3 more drinks. I bumped into a nice person who'd just finished work. It was 12.30 when I got home.

The next day was a write-off.

I've pretty much disgusted myself at my own inability to stop once I start. So much so that I haven't drunk  for 3 days. I don't feel any compunction to do so either.

I usually have a couple of beers after DMing on a Thursday just to decompress after the event.

But it's too expensive to drink and it is doing my brain no good at all. That and ultra-processed food. 

(Probably.)

My mate, Mat

 When the good are taken too soon

You’ve probably heard that quote from Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’. The girl whose entire life is horses is asked to define a horse. She can’t. Then the teacher asks favourite know-it-all Bitzer who gives a dictionary definition: "Bovine quadruped. Graminivorous,. Forty teeth…."

"There you go girl!" snaps the teacher "Now you know what a horse is."

Charles Fort - 'one measures the circumference of a circle beginning anywhere.' 

So here is an impression of my dear old friend, starting....somewhere.

Random memories of my friend and erstwhile enemy, Matthew Hardyman.

Snippets of our lives which will be meaningless to most or maybe all of you.

Mat was going to be my new Power of Attorney. How ironic that he went before me.

I have to admit my guilt: while others would have broken down I slept after having been given the news, having been unable to process it on the day. I couldn't understand why I wasn't breaking down as everyone else would, as society expects? 

Is it even reality? You're hoping you're in some insane lucid dream that will end soon and everything will be back to normal, although you know. 

You know.

The mere incomprehensibility of Mat not being in my life - let alone his family's - anymore was enough. 

Another number to remove from the favourites of my iPhone. 

So that night I ran a game of D&D for my group in Wells. It’s a weekly commitment and I didn’t feel like staying in and beating myself up for not being all emotional. 

I came back in a good mood, then went to sleep.

In the morning the meaning of it all began to drip-drip in to my consciousness.

Matt and I off our heads in a pub in Green Lanes, Haringey in 1993, alternating hysterical laughter with appalling gut ache.

Racing down to Dorset in Mat’s Renault 5 GT Turbo to reach Mark who’d crashed his supremely dodgy mini van with retread tyres on the way to his first day at Bournemouth college.

We shared a flat for a few years. He’d use everything in the kitchen to make a meal, then go out leaving it all everywhere. He either didn’t understand what was wrong with leaving a mess, or didn’t care.

He could be quite arrogant.

Arguing about him not doing the washing up; Mat finally conceding after 2 hours that he didn’t really like doing the washing up.

His confidence at a young age to argue the facts with anyone. So much so that a garage he harangued so much (where his appallingly unreliable GT Turbo often ended up) were pissed off enough to send him an invoice addressed to “Matthew Hardlyaman”.

He was thick-skinned enough to laugh at it though. That was a trait which took me a long time to assimilate. 

He was a rock. More rational and forensic than anyone anyone else I knew, I would come to him with work or relationship dilemmas and he would always - clinically - lay the arguments flat out and analyse them. 

A complete, instant dissection.

In relationships I naturally accepted that everything was my fault, being the man. But Mat had that barrister’s gift of seeing through the guff and grasping the brass tacks of any given situation. And he did it with such a calm dismantling of the arguments. It was wonderful. If he had been a therapist he could have charged twice the going rate.

I always felt so much calmer and in fact, often rearmed for the next sortie in my many disastrous relationships.  

I don't have that cornerman any more. 

Phobias: Mat had a texture problem with wet wood, so wooden spoons and wooden chopsticks were no-gos.

When writing these eulogies they’re only ever the finished article for a few hours, then something else is remembered. I've been trying to write this for days and it will never be the finished article.

Ah yes, Mat’s fashion choices!

The leather waistcoat, white denim jacket, and some designer black t-shirt with red zips all over it. 

T-shirts always tucked in.

(Of course, all my fashion choices were great….)

Early 90s again; I was on a disastrous date complete with (I’m not kidding) a leper doing card tricks at our table (the gods were doing their utmost to keep me and the awful female from coupling up) and as a coup de grace they sent Mat along to ‘give me a hand.’ Despite me looking him squarely in the eye and telling him in no uncertain terms to 'eff off', he thought I was joking and stayed.

Mat’s incredulity that a nice but dim someone at his university had applied at the same time for the diplomatic service and had got in while he hadn’t even had an interview. Mat’s brilliant gift of the gab combined with his natural confidence made him a fortune doing telesales, but also drove him nuts, so he then applied for the Bar. 

I remember him saying that he couldn’t believe you could get paid for arguing.

Mat always wanted a family. After an unsuccessful first marriage, he then met Suzy. He was overjoyed when Freya arrived in their lives, and then Saffron. He now had a loving family and a dream house. 

Unlike me both Mat and Suzy did grown-up jobs, endlessly juggling duties and work with military-standard organisation.

I'm godfather to his youngest daughter who is a total headcase. 

Good. 

In an increasingly homogenised and commodified world, we need characters - people who are bold enough to stand out and be individuals

So much to say. But with the memories I have that play back in my mind, he’s not really gone. Because I’ll always have those to relive time and again.

Top 500 barrister, MJ Hardyman.