Chez Spud

Heaven only knows what this post will look like. The general consensus was that Chez Spud is a bit broken for some people, not others. MrSpud worked like the little munchkin that he is and thought he’d resolved the reloading issue, but Miss Buckle broke the news this morning that he has not. Need to buy a bigger stick to beat him with…I have a fabulous guest blog post to put up about wedding photography. But I’m loathe to load it up to a crappy broken site. Cry cry cry.

Moments in time….I bought four cards today; a birthday card, a christening card, a baby congratulations card and a condolence card.  Standing in the queue to pay I looked at them and thought how I only needed a wedding card to have a full house, more or less. All these milestones, these moments in time that mark the passing of the years, the good times and the bad.

Lots of desperate news Chez Spud over the last week or so, it’s a bit gloomy round here. A very dear friend of mine died suddenly on Monday. I feel so shocked by his death and the cruel suddenness of it, he was only 51…actually the same age my mother was when she died. It seems so young. I can’t stop thinking about his wife and his four children, the youngest ones similar in age to the Megaboys. And I can’t believe I’m never going to see him again. I felt like this for a long time after my mother died…I could accept the fact that she was dead, and that in the midst of life we are in death etc etc, that death is the normal order of things. But I just couldn’t accept that one day she was alive and moaning at me, and the next she was gone. I felt so cheated, and I feel the same now about my friend R.

Oddly, the person I want to talk to about this bizarre feeling is R. I read a few articles about him and his death online today, all headed with a photo of him. I couldn’t bear to look at him because I wanted to chat to him, and hear his big fat laughter fill the room. I realise I sound like I had a total crush on him, but that’s not the case. He was just someone I loved, but not like that, and admired and respected. He was my boss for many, many  years, and a truly visionary leader..probably the only ‘born to it’ leader I’ve ever worked for.

Life is precious, that’s a truism. But some days, like these days, it feels so fragile you hardly dare breathe on it.

RIP R…I will miss our ‘conversations that we never had’…your booming laughter…your passion for thinking up double entendre codenames for projects we worked on… your warmth, wisdom and wit…your political nous and a complete devotion to what you believed in, regardless of whether it made you popular or not…and your unfailing loyalty and kindness.  Your love of air guitar and the vision of you strutting your stuff around the dance floor at a very fancy gala will stay with me all the days of my life. I hope they’ve got Bon Jovi on a loop up in heaven for you, and fine red wine on tap. Slurp and cheers to you my friend…the world is a quieter, duller place without you.

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