A.A.B. - IN MEMORIAM - TEN YEARS LATER... (Updated Yet Again - See Bottom Of Post)

Me, as Best Man, 15th December 1978.  The marriage was short-lived

On Monday 14th January 2013, I published a post about someone I once knew.  (Click here for details if you're interested.)  Little did I know at the time (only having found out on Sunday just gone) that a Facebook comment on Sunday 13th January 2013 - the day before the post - had expressed sadness at news of his demise sometime the previous week.  Well, what a shocker!  (Thing is, if he's dead, who subsequently amended some of the things on his Facebook page that I alluded to in my 'piece'?  But that's for pondering on another day, perhaps.)

When I recently did a 'Google Search' to again find his FB page, among the selections offered (though only when I used one particular browser out of several available to me) there were some photos and comments that aren't on his site, but apparently in the comments section on someone else's FB page.  (That's how I discovered the comment about his passing, though I was only able to access that link twice - it seems to have now disappeared.)  The photos show a ravaged man who looks far older than the 52 or 53 years he was at the time, likely as a result of him being an alcoholic, something he admitted when he visited our home town sometime in the late '90s or thereabouts (he'd lived 'down south' since late 1977) to a woman he called 'Auntie Margaret'.  

In case you're wondering how I know this, the woman herself told me when I ran into her around 1999 or 2000 and she mentioned that he'd been up for a visit a year or two before.  She'd attended the same church as him, his sister and parents (as in the same denomination, though maybe a different congregation) and was therefore a friend of the family, but he regarded her as an 'aunt-type' figure so that's how he referred to her.  Whether she minded or not (or was actually flattered) is something I'm not privy to, not that it's important.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about the news of his passing (if information that's ten years old can accurately be described as 'news' - though it was certainly news to me) as I now wouldn't have crossed the road to pee on him if he were on fire (as I said somewhere before).  However, this guy was once one of my best friends (if not my very best friend - when I was young enough to subscribe to such a notion), so for the sake of our childhood friendship I felt a little sad on learning he'd passed away.  (I'd met him on my first day at my second primary school, on Wednesday 10th November 1965.)  Strange, now, to think that while I'd subconsciously assumed he was yet gadding about somewhere, he'd embarked on the 'long sleep' more than ten years ago.

Sadly, he was a compulsive liar and inveterate fantasist who never seemed to realise that the 'tall tales' he told were so completely unlikely that many people who knew him as an adult regarded and dismissed him as a pathetic object of silent ridicule.  Who knows what made him like that - a need for attention, perhaps?  So the person whose death I'm sad about is the 6 (going on 7) to 21/22 year-old I once knew and liked, not the person he later became (or perhaps always was, but I just never noticed at the time).  Undoubtedly, a large part of my small sadness is related to the reminder of my own mortality that his passing begets, but it's also to do with a life he wasted and a potential he never fulfilled.

In previous posts I've referred to him as Billy Liar, which is probably more apt than Walter Mitty as there was an element of pathos to Billy Liar's predicament, whereas Walter Mitty's was more humorous, being played for laughs more than anything else.  I also called him 'Adam Cowie' on my blog, but his real name was Alan Bowie, which, long after I jettisoned him he amended to Alan Bowie-McDonald - though don't ask me why.  When we were teenagers he lamented the fact that he didn't have a 'middle' name, so I suggested Adam and he became for a good long while Alan Adam Bowie.  (Or A.A.B. when he was writing it on lampposts and walls with a broad-tipped ink marker pen.)

Anyway, unless reports of his death are 'greatly exaggerated' (and if they are, he'll probably be behind it) that's him gone from this softly-spinning green and blue globe which hangs upon nothing, and I'll never see him again this side of doomsday.  Except in memories and old photographs of course, when I still held his friendship in some regard before his slow-but-seemingly-certain slide into decadency and despair.

So here's to the memory of Alan Bowie - though not the Alan he became, but rather the Alan I believed him to be before the scales finally fell from my eyes and I saw him for what he was.  However, the end of our friendship was as a result of his unacceptable attitude and bewildering behaviour, not that of mine.  

Ah, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

The 10 year-old Facebook comment about his death, which I only saw this Sunday (17th)

(Update:) On his Facebook profile are numerous lies that bear little or no resemblance to reality, but one is so easily checkable that I'm surprisingly surprised (after all, none of his lies should ever have surprised me) at the audacity of it.  He claimed to have a rare form of Motor Neurone Disease called ATOL, but it's so 'rare' that it doesn't exist.  I checked with the Motor Neurone Disease Association (MNDA) and they've never heard of it, even asking me what the initials stood for.

Now, I very much doubt that he actually had MND, but if he did, you'd have thought that was bad enough without having to invent a 'rare form' of it, wouldn't you?  Or perhaps he just had to be different from your 'average' MND sufferer.  All I can say is that I'm extremely glad I don't suffer from his overwhelming compulsion to tell great big obvious stonking whoppers.  Now, you'll have to excuse me - I've got to take my new spaceship out on a trial trip to Alpha Centauri, but don't worry; thanks to its nuclear-powered warp-drive I should be back before teatime.

What do you mean you don't believe me?  Cheek!

A.A.B. in the back garden of his bedsit in St. Andrews Road, Southsea, December 1978 

Stop The Bus Dept: I've just found a recent email from the MNDA in my Junk file, which made me wonder for a moment whether I might've been doing my former friend an injustice in regard to his 'ATOL'.  Here's a 'cut and paste' of part of its contents...

There is a form of MND called Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS):  This is the most common form of MND, with weakness and wasting in the limbs, muscle stiffness and cramps.  Someone may notice they are tripping when walking or dropping things.  Life expectancy is usually two to five years from the onset of symptoms.

I don’t know if this is perhaps what your friend had, but it may be that he was using an incorrect acronym.  There are many variations of MND but I am not familiar with ATOL.

However, according to my ex-pal ATOL is a rare form of MND, whereas ALS is the most common so simply getting the acronym wrong wouldn't really account for the discrepancy.  I'm therefore disinclined to be charitable and give him the benefit of any doubt - especially as there's no doubt all his other lies were definitely just that.

(Yet another update:) I 'phoned a couple of funeral directors near to where he'd lived and one was able to confirm his death as they'd arranged proceedings.  He died on January 10th 2013 and was cremated on February 1st (16 days short of what would've been his 54th birthday).  Strange to think that he left our home town in 1977 and that for most of his life he'd lived elsewhere.  I wonder whether he ever missed the place where his parents had brought him up?  Also, he left this world under another name, not his birth name, which, to me, seems incredibly sad.  Was that his wish or was it something he hadn't even considered?  I'll never know, but he'll always be Alan Bowie to me, not Bowie-McDonald.  I never knew that man.

P.S. I've just been messaged by one of his FB friends who informed me that he died of cancer.  Surprisingly, he made no mention of that particular illness on his FB page.  I hope his demise wasn't too painful and that he met it peacefully.  Marge, the woman with whom he lived (not his wife), predeceased him, but I don't think it was by long.  Perhaps, along with his illness, he just lost the will to live after she died?  A sad end indeed.

Again, outside Portsmouth Register Office, 15th December 1978.  In case
you're wondering why I'm the only one looking at the camera, there were
two (one in front, one on the left), both taking photos at the same time

(And another one:) The Cornish Gazette kindly provided me with a copy of his funeral service notice and I was surprised to see only the name of McDonald used, not Bowie-McDonald.  The latter double-barrelled name was the one I supplied to the funeral directors when making enquiries, and the dates of his death and cremation - as well as his age and where he'd lived - are a match, so there seems no reason to doubt it's the same person.  His second wife left him (just like his first) and he and his daughter were estranged (her decision) so the 'much loved husband and father' is likely only following the usual 'etiquette' employed in such situations.  After all, no-one who dies is ever a "wrong 'un", are they?  Still, it's a sad situation, all things considered.  (Though I suppose it's always possible there was a reconciliation of sorts if they learned he was dying.)

I've printed out his death notice and affixed it inside a notebook he gifted me back in December of 1980, which is quite appropriate and also somewhat ironic I suppose, in that the details of his funeral service are now recorded in the pages of the book he gave me over 40 years earlier when he was very much alive.  And here endeth his story - a whole 10 years and 8 months after he died.

Update, 10-1-'24: I've now also added an 'In Memoriam' notice which appeared in my local weekly newspaper today.  For the story of that, see here.

Alan around the age of 7 or 8, I'd guess.  He gave me this
photo when I was down in Southsea/Portsmouth in 1978