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| Joe at the back door of family home just before it was sold |
Just learned this afternoon that a childhood friend died yesterday in hospital. I say 'childhood friend', but though we first met in 1965 and were friends up into adulthood, I stopped having anything to do with him in 1982 as he could no longer be relied upon to keep his word. Around 2010 we renewed our friendship, but in the interim he had become an alcoholic and a drug addict, adding those vices to that of his chain-smoking. I fell out with him again a few years ago because he'd become a bad-tempered, paranoid, surly, unpleasant, rude individual (too much cannabis) and the occasional fleeting glimpses of the person he'd once been weren't sufficient to enable me to overlook his excesses when they reared their ugly head. His name? Joseph Walter Beattie and he was a year or two younger than me.
We'd lived in the same street in the 1960s and, together with the late Alan Adam Bowie, the three of us had comprised 'The Adventurers', a name I'd chosen to represent the numerous escapades in which we became embroiled in the innocence of youth when we thought we had forever in front of us. Whether Alan or Joe ever applied the name to themselves I have no idea, but that's how I envisioned us whenever we were out exploring places we had no right to be or were even safe to go or not. Ah, what fun and excitement we had, often escaping the potentially dire consequences of our exploits by the skin of our teeth and living to tell (no doubt with a heavy helping of hyperbole) of our excursions into spectacular situations and scary scenarios. I'll never see days like that again, nor will Alan or Joe.
Perhaps they're both now in a better place, reminiscing about old times and wondering just where their 'leader' is? Given the state of my health these days, who knows - perhaps it won't be that long 'til I join them, but I continue to hope I've got at least another 50 years before that happens. So long, Joe, here's to the person you used to be before you fell in with the wrong crowd and allowed yourself to be led down the wrong path.
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| Joe in living-room of his then soon-to-be-sold family home |
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