I received sad news of the sudden and unexpected death of someone I once knew well. Paul and I were firm friends at secondary school. We were in the same first year and bonded over comparing packed lunches in a ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you mine’ kinda way as we walked around the playing fields at break time. His sarnies were always more upper crust. It was 1972 and salami and other fancy foreign fillings weren’t on the menu in my working-class home. But Mum made up for it by slipping a chocolate bar into my box. Together with my old mucker, Clive, we were ‘The Three Fey Musketeers’, a phrase I first used in 2011 when I wrote…

Clive and I know one another from our salad days. In those distant times we were two of the three fey musketeers. Our third partner in camp crime was Paul who jumped the good ship Blighty many decades ago to dwell in a Parisian garret and chain-smoke Gitanes. Birds of a feather flock together. We somehow knew we were different and so did everyone else. We were relentlessly teased from the moment we entered the school gates. Nothing physical, you understand. That would be unseemly at a traditional grammar school with 400 years of history. Besides, beatings were reserved for the teachers to discharge. I suppose we hardly helped our cause by being rubbish at rugby and lip-synching to the backing vocals of Mott the Hoople’s Roll Away the Stone in Clive’s front room. Our sex education consisted of lecturing hormonal adolescents on the evils of masturbation. It nearly caused a riot.

It’ll Make You Go Blind

After school, Paul and I gradually grew apart as life took us down very different paths. Clive and I, on the other hand, remained close. After Paul left for gay Paree, I only saw him once in a rare blue moon. But I hope he died as he had lived, holding court in a French café with a fruity little red in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

Back in 2020, Clive died suddenly, and my last brief encounter with Paul was at Clive’s funeral. Clive’s death hit me hard; Paul’s not so much. But even so, it was still a shock. It got me thinking of our teen years when the three of us were practically joined at the hip. Here’s the only photo I have of Paul and Clive together. I took it while waiting to catch the 37 bus home, probably during that long hot summer of ’76. Clive’s on the right playing the ghoul and Paul’s in the middle wearing the Bowie badge. The boy on the left is Carl, another old school chum. I wonder where he is now. The fuzzy old pic stirred up memories of the fun times and made me regret that we hadn’t made more of an effort to keep in touch.

I must confess, the tragic news of Paul’s death has also got me thinking about my own mortality as the last man standing. And then there was one 😔