Go On, Indulge Me - In Memoriam (One More Time)...

Remembering

ALAN BOWIE

(17-2-1959 - 10-1-2013)

Those were the days, my friend,

we thought they'd never end.

Tiddely pom.

******

So why another 'In Memoriam' post for the same person and a repeat of the above photo after its previous outing a few months back?  Simple.  It's now 11 years to the day since my erstwhile friend passed away (though I never learned of the fact 'til September of last year) and I thought I'd mark the anniversary of his passing on Crivens, as well as in my local weekly newspaper which goes on sale today.  (11 years ago, the 10th was a Thursday, not a Wednesday, not that it much matters.)  I never realised that such notices were so expensive, but I thought it was worth the cost to reaffirm his connection (under his own name) to the town he'd grown up in.

You see, at some stage in the last 26 years or thereabouts of his life, he'd taken to calling himself Alan Bowie-McDonald, though (for reasons beyond my ken) notice of his funeral service in the Cornwall Gazette was listed only under McDonald, which I thought somewhat lacking as, even had anyone from his youth seen it, they wouldn't have known it was him.  I felt compelled to redress the balance by ensuring that his death was also recorded in our home town's local paper under his 'real' name, even if it was 11 years after-the-fact.  It didn't seem right otherwise, even though he'd spent his last 35 years down south after joining the Royal Navy at the age of 18.

You may be wondering about the 'Tiddely pom' line so allow me to explain.  Sometime around 1975 or '76 I bought a combined volume of A.A. Milne's 'Winnie The Pooh' and 'The House At Pooh Corner' (from, if memory serves, the local Boots The Chemist, in whose warehouse I then worked), in which the following poem appeared:

                                                                    The more it snows

                                                                             (Tiddely pom),

                                                                    The more it goes

                                                                             (Tiddely pom),

                                                                    The more it goes

                                                                             (Tiddely pom),

                                                                        On snowing.

                                                                     And nobody knows

                                                                             (Tiddely pom),

                                                                     How cold my toes

                                                                             (Tiddely pom),

                                                                     How cold my toes

                                                                             (Tiddely pom),

                                                                        Are growing.

Don't ask me why, but this greatly amused me (yeah, yeah, I know - simple things please simple minds - heard it before) and I soon made AB aware of it, who likewise found it amusing.  That same night (I think) we were both out and it happened to be snowing, so the pair of us launched into an impromptu recitation of the poem - then repeated it over and over again.  Subsequently, we only had to say 'Tiddely pom' to one another to conjure up memories of that snow-clouded evening when we were both only around 16 or 17 years of age.  For that reason I thought it was a nice way to round off the lines from Mary Hopkin's 'Those Were The Days', which we also used to belt-out from time-to-time when reminiscing about the past.

It's strange to think that he spent nearly two-thirds of his life elsewhere, because I still mainly associate him with our town.  There are few spots I can go to which don't conjure forth memories of us roaming or exploring as kids or teens so it's odd to realise that, eventually, his main store of recollections would've consisted of times, people and places from after he'd left our town, myself, and everyone else he'd known far behind.  In due course he'd have come to regard somewhere else as 'home', not where he'd grown up, whereas my 'geographical allegiances' remained the same.  Not that he ever 'forgot' where he was from as it was listed on his Facebook page, but perhaps it was no longer as relevant to him as it had once been.

Anyway, I just couldn't permit notice of his passing (and under a different surname to boot) be confined to another part of the UK, leaving the area he originally hailed from and his birth name unacknowledged, so I thought it only proper and fitting that his home town's local newspaper should also recognise and remember him (better late than never).  To my mind, this is where he yet belongs and, like I said, though the majority of his memories were doubtless of other times and other places and people, it's the earlier ones coinciding with mine which I'd like to think were among the most notable to him, however self-centred that sentiment may seem.  I can never really know, of course, but it's not altogether beyond the bounds of possibility.

I'll purchase my local paper when I'm down at the shops later today, scan the notice, print it out, and then affix it inside the Navy notebook he gave me (along with his old wallet) the last time he was in my house when he was up in our home town on a brief visit in December of 1980.  That somehow seems fitting, don't you think?

Pax vobiscum.  (And Tiddely pom.)