Gone but not forgotten

I had cause to reach out to a former colleague and old friend this afternoon. I hadn't seen him in the flesh for more than twenty years, but we'd stayed in touch on and off, not least because of our shared interest in creative writing. We proof-read and critiqued each other's work, sometimes. Anyway, I hadn't heard from him since the summer of 2022 when, in reply to an email I'd sent him about blog radio silence, he mentioned that he wasn't writing and wasn't having the greatest year either. To my shame and regret, I didn't follow up on that.

When I struggled to get in touch with him today, I headed over to his Flickr stream - photography was always his most prolific outlet - and found that whilst his account is still there, it's now labelled "In Memoriam".

Now he was a doggedly private person, whose online presence was kept to the minimum necessary to pursue his interests, so it was no surprise that Googling turned up no details of his demise. Only by searching probate records was I able to discover that he'd died in December 2022, just six months after our last email conversation. So I don't know the circumstances of his death, although I have ideas that I won't go into here.

What I will say is that there was a time, a quarter of a century ago, when I considered him a good friend, an outsider-ally in the corporate circus we briefly inhabited. Since we both left that place, he grew into a better writer of fiction than I will ever be, and an accomplished wildlife and astronomy photographer. He also had an excellent, dark sense of humour, though he had his share of demons too. Most of all, he was always a thoroughly decent bloke.

There was a fair degree of overlap in our musical Venn diagram - something else to bond over - but a key difference is that he considered The Rolling Stones to be the greatest band ever to have walked the planet. Now I don't mind them at all, but he knew their work inside out and revered them, in the same way that I laud The Jam or Gene. So it seems only appropriate to belatedly mark my friend's sad passing with something by Mick and the lads. From Let It Bleed, this is Monkey Man.

Rest in peace, Mark.