Three years on...

Me with John in Estepona 14 years ago

Three years on from John’s death, and I’m reflecting on the different ways different people miss loved ones.

For some, even after a thousand days, life without John still makes no sense. The disbelief that he is somehow not in this world anymore has not dimmed, despite that time passing. For others, the world has begun to adjust and weave its way around the various John-shaped holes that glaringly exist.

I tend to miss John in two ways: when I remember times and places where he had been (such as the holiday in Estepona in the photo above), and when I have experiences I want to share with him. And, wholly predictably, many of these times of missing accumulate around politics, music, and the idiocy of humanity, sometimes in combination.

For example, this last year of British politics has had many bizarre moments that would have intrigued, excited, puzzled and tickled John. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader would, I think, have delighted him. An old school socialist with compassion and an eclectic dress sense (Corbyn, not Falkenberg) taking the fight to the increasingly rabid posh-boy Tories, and the subsequent systemic “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” activities of disgruntled MPs. The continuing decimation of the NHS by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt (who was memorably renamed, much to John’s delight, by James Naughtie on the BBC’s flagship morning radio news programme a few years previously when he was Culture Secretary). The rise of the right and the xenophobia, racism and fear it brings with it.

The US Republican presidential candidate selection process – a delicious slow train-smash of political self-destruction – is somehow drab without the sharp-tongued, insightful analysis that John would have brought. He would have predicted the order of candidates falling beneath the Trump juggernaut, and would have been the only person to have been able to explain to me not just what could happen at the Republican convention, but to lay good odds on the outcome. And I suspect the apparent rise of “Trump the politician” would have been the year’s combination of idiocy and politics for John.

There have been some remarkable comings and goings in my world of music this year, and I missed not speaking with John about them. Seeing David Gilmour live again would have warranted a conversation about the reworking of old classics. The new PJ Harvey album (including its misrepresented reportage about parts of Washington DC) would have likely interested him, but I know he would have engaged with me on it, having shared that PJ Harvey gig in New York with me ten years ago. The death of Bowie, just after the release of the superlative Blackstar, would have been a big discussion point (as indeed, the death of Victoria Wood would have too, but for very different reasons).

But it is often in the mundane that John can reappear most poignantly:

Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest recipe book, Nopi: the cookbook, contains some of the dishes John ate when we were there with Kenneth and Barbara-Anne in its early days. It’s sad that John can’t have a go at my versions of some of them, given he so enjoyed Ottolenghi’s food, including my go-to dish, spiced red lentils.

I am currently slowly working my way through my vinyl record collection (in alphabetical order by artist, and chronologically within each artist, of course; it’s not OCD, it’s just correct) and every now and then I land on one of John’s albums, such as his well-worn copy of Garcia. Two Mahavishnu Orchestra records, Apocalypse and Visions of the emerald beyond, were the most recent – intriguing segues between the world of hard core jazz and blissed out rock and another link between John’s world of music and my own. (His introduction to the Grateful Dead through burned CDs with their black and white printed covers – still in my collection – led me to the world of Phish and a whole new world of stoner rock, though I suspect last year’s Dead tour with Phish’s Trey Anastasio stepping in for Garcia would not have gone down well with John.)   

I have replaced two iPod speaker docks this year because of their FPOS short shelf life. Neither one was thrown against a wall in a fit of Falkenbergesque catharsis, but they were well-cursed nevertheless.

It is in these small, ordinary things that John can feel most missed, but also most remembered.

So here we are, three years on since John’s untimely death, and the world continues to go to hell in a hand-basket without his physical presence. But his influence, memory and impact continue to exist, to play out in my life and that of so many others.

I’ll be raising a thankful glass to him and remembering the privilege it was to have him as a friend.