Celebrating after Michael Cameron's memorial

Helena and I drove to Mortlake to attend the service celebrating Michael Cameron's life.  There was an enormous turn-out which filled the chapel where we joined in with a Humanist celebration.  Friends of Michael talked about him and his influence on them, and many others. There were only a few like Pip and Mary, and Helena and I to whom he was just a friend, as we had no connection with his life's work as both a graphic designer, and an interior designer.  But he was also a hugely respected and renowned teacher of all these subjects at many top art schools at different periods of his life between periods of practical work in the industry.

I met Michael in my second term at college, aged 19, when I helped to start an 'International Film Club', which he joined immediately. I commissioned him to design a membership card which we had printed and which I still have a copy of somewhere.  When I find it I will blip it, as  it is a wonderfully evocative piece of work.  From then on we became good mates throughout our college lives and beyond until now, and shared our mutual love for music of our times.  Soon after we met Michael laid me down on the floor of his bedsit, with my head between the speakers of the first stereo sound system I had ever heard, playing me Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks', six months before it was released in Britain. That was just the beginning. There were many similar tales of Michael bringing amazing new music to all his friends.

The memorial was intense and moving and I'm sure everyone came away with a new perspective on what their friend Michael had meant to so many others. Poems were read about him, tributes from former students around the world were quoted and several of his favourite pieces of music were played. Tears flowed.

We all then went to a venue on the banks of the Thames, close to Hammersmith Bridge, where a lot of wine was available, and which had been essential in nearly any meeting with Michael.  There we could talk to the other people who had gathered today, most of whom had been only names in my conversations with Michael.  I did know a few people including the mother of Michelle, Michael's daughter whom I'd first known when she was only a year old.

I had found out that Michael had suddenly died when I received an email out of the blue two weeks ago.  Michael D. had found my original Blip of Michael, when he did a Google search.  So I was delighted to find that the memorial DVD, which his friends had beautifully prepared (and which Helena has shown in her Blip of this day) had included my portrait of him.

I made an effort at the party to find Michael D. as we had never met before.  I managed to get him to pose for this picture, with Carolyn L., another friend of Michael Cameron, from the time when they all worked together at a design company called Crighton's, in the 1990s. I'm sure they won't mind being my subject for this memorial to Michael Cameron.   RIP