The past is the most seductive rabbit-hole of all. Like everybody else in these unprecedented timesTM, I'm trying to work out who I am and how I got here. Yesterday a helping hand came in the form of 27 photos from 1977 or 78, a bunch of mates doing the stupid things mates did back then, the world ahead of us and the possibilities endless. Of the 21 or so of us that figure in those photos, four are dead. Howie was the first, brutally snatched by some sort of leukemia around the same time that Marc Bolan and Elvis Presley died. As a group of eighteen and nineteen year olds we trooped to a cavernous church on Merseyside for the funeral, unable to understand what had happened and quick to shake it off.
There were two Duncs, blond Dunc and Dunc P, and I remembered the blond one and not the other one. The other one is no longer alive, and I have no idea how or why.
DV I remember oh so well. DV because he had a Deep Voice. DV left university at the end of his second year and became a fireman, and married the spectacularly sexy Carolyn. I kept up with DV sporadically over the years, and spent an afternoon in the sun with him watching other friends play cricket in Manchester in 1996. I remember how he looked at me appreciatively, and that we talked about Camus and Catholicism. He died of bladder cancer about 10 years later.
The 27 photos came in WhatsApp group, recently formed so that we can all hold a virtual wake for Henry, aka Andrew, over Zoom. Henry was a catalyst in spite of himself, a disturbingly quite and beautiful fair-haired angel, who slipped out of university and what passed for regular life with none of us understanding what was happening until his parents came to take him home. I never saw him again, but in the days before the parental intervention, Henry was not sleeping at all, drinking gallons of milk a day, refusing to clear his room of the bottles and tearing the medicine cabinet off the wall to burn it because drugs were the work of the devil. Like Howie's death, we were confronted by a reality that nothing in our young lives had prepared us for up to then. My friend Helen went to a priest to ask for advice on how to deal with a friend who was given to raving about what God was telling him to do. The priest suggested kindly and firmly that we contact the university medical services and the young man's parents quickly, so we did, and Henry disappeared, to God knows what life.
What with the flood of photographic nostalgia and the proposed Zoom wake, it seemed to me a good idea to suggest that we share photos of how we look in 2020, so that we're not too shocked or shocking. It's reassuring to see the bones of the person that somebody once was, when they were still in flares, and know that just as they were then, they are now, and the same goes for me too. I'm not sad for the past that is gone, but I am very glad to have lived it.
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