Another R.I.P........
It's been pretty much a whole year since I wrote anything on here. To be honest, the heart went out of me for doing it when Reanna died and I finished off making it into a tribute to her. To start with, when things happened that would have amused her, it was just too hard to write. Then it was too busy and then it was too long since the last post.
And suddenly, it is another new year, and another person gone to whom I want to pay tribute.
After a run of doing things on the internet which surprise me that I know how to do these days, I set up an online reunion for the 6th form of the school I was at, based on the year I was in the upper 6th and which for me was quite possibly the best year of my life. Turns out that this year is 40 years since. I have stayed in touch with my longest serving best buddy, and one other with whom time elapsed and distance doesn't matter. In more recent years (of the 40) I have been in touch with several others and indeed three of us had a mini-reunion in our home town just 3 years ago. Lots to catch up on, and not all of it good as two of our number were already gone well before their time. I'd had a bit of a dig around to try to find certain people over the years but since Friends Reunited was replaced by facebook there are usually 2 million people worldwide with the name of your ex school mate and no guarantee they are even on FB.
So, imagine my delight to find that a bloke who'd been through the entire senior school alongside me turned up and he had, all this time, been in touch with three people I had always wanted to catch up with.
Only just a couple of weeks later he messaged me to say that Jan had died. Ovarian cancer. He'd known but not been able to tell us.
I am gutted, again more than I probably should be. Poor Chris, having that secret to carry for a while. Poor friends. Poor family, and poor Jan. She was a shining star and maybe best that we remember her that way, apparently her daughter looks like her at that age. It's so easy to speak well of the dead and produce glowing eulogies. How sad that she is lost as soon as she was found, that we never got to catch up, that she will never know how much she was loved by people she must have assumed had forgotten all about her years ago.
Quite the contrary. She was a legend and still shall be. One of twins, non identical, her twin brother having straight dark hair and she having rampant long curly vivid ginger locks. And an afghan coat which went into 6th form legend. I don't remember her as having close female friends, she always seemed to be one of the lads in the nicest possible way and probably Dave (her twin) was her best friend anyway. She was a true individual and to my mind very very cool and it amazed me that she was friends with me at all since I just really wanted to be cool too!
It was a great year, a coming of age, we were the first privileged incumbents of the newly built 6th form common room and with our very own head of 6th form. There was a lot of talent both academically, musically, artistically and personality-wise, we were fortunate indeed to have teachers who treated us as equals in some cases and actually socialised with us from time to time. There was a lot of good humour and a harmless amount of fooling around; the "in" crowd was not based on the superficiality it has come to infer. Jan was definitely one of the in crowd.
I can't believe I left it too late. It's a real smack round the earhole reminder not to let people go so easily. I am unbelievably humbled and flattered, actually I'm perplexed, to hear I got a mention in the service today, surely there were many other people remembered for being her friends was back when.
They played "Gimme Shelter" at the end of the service. Nice one, we did all like the Stones even then. What would I play for her? Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Forever Young? I remember her how she was. I've got nothing but my memories to offer and in the great scheme of things knew her for a fraction of her life but I believe we were all like family growing up together in a way which relates us however far apart we drift, the times we shared were some of the most intense because of the age we were, when we thought the world was at our feet and anything might be possible. At times like these I want to close ranks and draw comfort from those of us who remember her with affection.