Sorry, one of those depressing posts - albeit not one about depression itself in this case - so feel free to skip.
In the last six weeks, my wife and I both lost good friends of ours, and not to COVID either. Both were a little bit older than us, but not that much older, and seemingly in perfect health, yet both keeled over from a heart attack. Heck, in the case of one of ours friends, his wife is an MD and I believe the heart attack happened when both were at home. In the case of the other friend, we were in discussion with him and his wife about his plans for a round birthday celebrations when suddenly everything went quiet and I found out a few days later that he had suddenly passed away.
I'm glad that we were in conversation with both of them shortly before they passed, as we weren't even able to attend either friend's funeral. One of them lived in the UK and the other one in Brazil and the current pandemic put the kibosh on short notice travel.
I'm not that great at staying in touch with my friends, but this has again driven the point home that you never know when the bony guy with the scythe comes knocking. It's led to more self reflection at our end, too, and I think we'll both end making some changes to the way we try to do life.
But so that this post isn't all depressing, let me share the obituary and some stories about my friend Neil: https://www.motorcyclenews.com/neil-murray-obit/
And that's not even half of it, the stuff that's in the obituary. For some odd reason, they left out the bit where Neil and some other members of the Usenet newsgroup we were in at the time managed to prank that particular publication with the news that Honda allegedly was developing a supercharged V-twin, after we had noticed that someone was using the newsgroup as an informal source. And of course when Kawasaki came out with the supercharged H2 over a decade later, he bought one. After figuring out how to best use it for tax writeoffs, too.
I think his passions in life were family, food/drink, motorcycles and journalism, roughly in this order. He was one of those "wonderfully eccentric" (his daughter's words, not mine) people that you occasionally seem to find amongst British journalists. The motorcycle journalism was really more of a decently paid (as these things go) passion project and side hustle before the word was common, as his main work tended to be as a journalist and then editor for specialist trade publications.
Story time, though - this is just stuff I remember off the top of my head, simply because there are so many of them that are uniquely Neil.
He was the consummate Wheeler Dealer with an encyclopedic knowledge of motorcycles of the 70s onwards. And when it came to haggling, he made Mike Brewer look like the rank amateur he is. One evening (beers or wine may have been involved), I asked him about this, as he seemed to be the kind of person who could out-haggle a carpet seller in a Middle Eastern bazaar somewhere. The answer was typical Neil - "well, that's where I learned to haggle, in the bazaars in North Africa".
Turns out that his father was somehow "in the diplomatic service" and attached to embassies, and of course the kids would move from posting to posting with their parents, and one of the duty stations was somewhere in North Africa. Of course shopping at the bazaar was normal back then. Apparently both him and his siblings got both the travel bug and the eccentricity from their parents.
But, motorcycles. He was constantly flipping 70s and 80s Japanese and European bikes, mostly Japanese though. Not a big fan of British bikes, although he did own a few newer Triumphs at some point. And as he pointed out, once you're known as the weirdo who buys certain old motorcycles, they just tend to start showing up, and he was always on the lookout for bikes that either could be broken for spares or nice condition bikes that needed something.
We had a few fun trips around England when I helped him pick up the odd bike, and one of the most memorable ones was a very nice Suzuki GT380 that somehow wouldn't run. It had compression, it had spark and it had fuel. But run, it wouldn't. So we dragged it back home to his garage and between rain showers tried to figure out why. Of course he got the bike so cheap that it would've made him money just in parts, but it was too nice for that. I still remember when he burst into the kitchen - I was making more tea for us to somehow keep warm on a chilly British summer or autumn day - and announced "they used blimmin' carpet underlay for the air filters". I had to go look for myself and sure enough, someone had removed the original filtration material and wrapped the skeleton of the air filter in carpet underlay, neatly stitched together. And of course carpet underlay is well known for its ability to filter stuff by not letting any air through...
He was also infamous for having a sticker made that looked like one of the typical "Danger" stickers, but read "Not to be operated by berkeleywits". For obvious reasons I can't post a photo of that, but the stickers would show up in odd locations because he was traveling a lot all over the world for work. Including one that allegedly graced the cockpit of a commercial airliner, but of course there would be no evidence of that *coughcoughcough*, right?
Yes, I have a couple of those stickers including one on my toolbox, and one of his daughters put one on the casket before it was lowered into the grave. Of course after said casket was taken from the church to the cemetery in the sidecar of a Suzuki Hayabusa, with an entirely (in)appropriate number of beans given along the way.
I think as long as your friends still fondly remember the stories, you're not really gone. And now I've got to find the barsteward who's been chopping onions in my office while I was typing this.
