I opened a drawer....

....and found an album of Bobby's photos.  One he'd put together as a young man, with his strange left handed writing still sturdy beneath each print.

Bobby's life was spent taking photos from the belly of a plane which meant that he could never be bothered to take photos when he came back down to earth. 

This turned out to be a good thing because all of them were photos of him taken by other people.

This one caught my eye.  Beneath it he'd written 'Gill, myself, Bryan and Adrian'

No one can remember who Gill was and I didn't press Lizzie on the matter.

The other two were the wallpaper of my childhood and their children continue to be my friends

Bobby's inscription said 'North Wittering 1962'

I was born 10 years later.  

Bryan Harvey was practical and funny.  Adrian Saul was intellectual and prone to bouts of existential angst.

When my parents bought the cottage that came to be known as 'The Grot', Bryan would come and do stuff.  He knocked down walls and plastered and painted and rewired and plumbed. He fed me sugar lumps off a spoon and my Ma didn't object because it made me happy (and high). His children made me happier and higher because they were older than I and invented games that involved general chaos which was always cut too short by Bryan's death knell (at the end of a boozy adult evening) when he'd wade through piled cushions and pillows and say 'OK troops, time to go'. 

Adrian was a Jewish Anglo-Indian melancholic hypochondriac from Calcutta.  When he left India as a 19 year old his aim was to meet Sartre and de Beauvois at Les Deux Magots in Paris and talk philosophy. He never did and it rained and he didn't have a rain coat so he ended up taking refuge in London with his cousin Henry.

The January of Loss was the month we moved to La Borde.  Bryan hung himself and the cancer that had been diagnosed 6 weeks before killed Adrian before the month was out. 

That was 18 years ago and over those years I wondered if Bobby suffered more, because longer. 

Dan Saul called me today and said that for 18 years his dad's ashes have languished in a cupboard and asked if we could put him and Bobby together in a little ceremony on the banks of the Thames. 

I said yes and made a promise to Bryan that I'd throw a sugar lump into the mix.