Fighting the dying of the light in a shit hotel in Bristol

A message from the blue opens a journey of reflection — from childhood friendship to love, illness, ageing, and the quiet shock of losing a friend.

Let me paint you a picture.

I’m downstairs in my living room on a Friday night, a glass of single malt in my hand, half-watching YouTube videos of skateboarders falling off things.

Just another ordinary evening, killing time thinking about going to bed.

Then a message arrived on my phone.

A very old friend of mine, someone I’d lost touch with over the last few years, has died.

Steve had been a friend of mine since we were fourteen years old. To see those words written on my phone in simple plain text hit harder than if they’d been trailing behind a fucking aeroplane on a banner.

The funeral was arranged for a couple of weeks later. So the suit came out of the mothballs, a hotel was booked, and we set off for Bristol.

Getting into the hotel was a nightmare.

I’m registered disabled and these days it’s getting harder and harder to get around.

Rolling a suitcase down a flight of stairs is a bind when you use a walking stick. Trying to manoeuvre through a door holding both things can be a bastard, especially when the girl behind the desk has to put her magazine down and do what she’s paid to do, while staring at you with that “what the fuck do you want?” look on her face.

I’d planned to take my wife out around Bristol that night, show her the bright lights.

Something we do very little these days.

Maybe a meal out — a couple of pubs around the town, just to see what’s what.

The sort of stuff we used to do when we were younger, before arthritis started to cripple me.

We ended up in a corporate, plain bog-standard pub with a microwaved plate of shit for our tea because it was the nearest, and then limped back to our room with intentions of going out later for another try.

Sitting in that hotel room, I couldn’t help thinking about Steve and the life he’d lived.

While I was planning a quiet night out and struggling with stairs and doorways, he’d spent years bouncing around the world, building businesses, catching planes, turning up in countries most people only see on maps.

Bristol for me was a hotel room and bad pub food. For Steve, it had always been airports and new horizons.

How fantastic is that.

Steve loved life and packed so much in — travel around the world, motor racing, gigs, all the things he loved. All brought and paid for by his own two hands, with the business he started as a carpenter.

My life, on the other hand, has mostly been about finding stability and control, trying to bring some order to the chaos that was my childhood. I absolutely succeeded in that.

Back when we were kids, I met Steve at boarding school in Devon — a place for so-called “difficult” or “maladjusted” kids, where a lot of us were simply parked until we were old enough to be sent out into the world.

And my oh my, were we ever sent out into the world when the time came.

I left school on a train one morning and was duly plonked onto a platform at Paddington Station. Not even a goodbye.

Steve came to see me in London a few weeks later and we had the best time — two punks in London with the whole city at our disposal, no time limits and no reason to do anybody else’s bidding.

I showed him around the squats I was living in and hanging around, the pubs, the chaos of it all. When he went back to Bristol he had a shiny new tattoo to remember it by.

I never got to leave that room again that night. The long corridor and the steps up to the car park made the place feel more like a prison cell.

So I was lying there in the dark, my legs by now far too painful to even think about sleep, when a thought popped into my head like they do at that time of night.

The thing Steve had loved most about life was his family.

His wife Lin, his brother Gordon, sister Tanya, and most of all, dare I say it, his daughter Stacy.

I’d really only met up with Steve a couple of times since we left school. Our interactions were mainly by Facebook, phone call or text message.

Hardly ever did he not mention Stacy. His love for her always shone through like a beacon.

He never said to me, “I love my Stacy, she’s my world.”

He never had to.

It was obvious. Absolutely obvious to anyone.

And that’s what I think the whole point is — two lives running almost parallel. Both of us love our family. Both of us worked hard to build a life, and in a real way both of us landed exactly where we wanted to be.

From dark beginnings we shared so much in life, without being joined at the hip.

At the funeral Steve mentioned me in his eulogy, which he'd written himself--

something I never expected at all, Saying his good friend Phil was there at boarding school and the years after , he even mentioned the trip to London. It was an honour and privilege to hear that.

When I got home , I poured a large malt and put some music on and came across a song that really made me think about all that had happened The dying of the light by Noel Gallaghers high flying birds

Steve was like me, many things to many people.

Mostly, to me, I’ll always remember him as a friend.

A real friend.

And yes Steve, if you ever can read this in the afterlife… I will keep fighting the dying of the light.