Doug

The Jet Miners Inn in Great Broughton in North Yorkshire is where I had my first and, for a long time, my only Steak Diane.  You see, the chef must have read about it in a book as being a steak cooked with a creamy sauce but had clearly never had one himself so made a guess at it.  This one came with about an inch of thick béchamel sauce piled on top and was distinctly odd; even my unsophisticated palette in my late teens knew it was wrong and I didn’t try one again for years.

I’d gone there on a ‘foursome’ with my mate Doug and our girlfriends at the time; it says something that I remember the steak but can’t remember who the girlfriends were.  Doug had a car, an Austin Cambridge with red leather seats, so we could go out and enjoy country pubs.  Doug and I had met when we were about six years old at Green Lane school; our big sisters were already friends.  We were best mates as we grew up; same taste in music and one of us was always at the other’s house watching TV, playing Subbuteo or with our model railways.  We went trainspotting together at Darlington and Newcastle stations, fuelled by egg and salad cream sandwiches made up by our mothers and wrapped in tin foil.  If Doug was coming to our house for tea my mother would always make a chocolate cake and we considered it a badge of honour to finish the whole cake in one session.  After we passed the 11 plus exam Doug went to Acklam Hall school just up the road, while I went to the High School on the other side of town.  We remained close friends though and indeed, our circle of friends widened as people from both schools got drawn in.  We had a daft phase of talking in ‘backward language’ and to this day I am known amongst those friends as ‘Doogie’ and him as ‘Nosser’, derived from our surnames spelled backwards.  Doug and I went off on lads holidays to the Norfolk Broads and London where we no doubt drank too much but had a great time.

We lost touch a bit once we were working.  I moved away from our home town, I got married, he got married and I got married again.  Once the internet started up we got back in touch again and whilst we’ve not seen a lot of each other, we kept in touch on WhatsApp and had an annual reunion in York each December for a few years with the rest of ‘the lads’ from that time.  That’s him on the right.

Doug didn’t make the last reunion; he wasn’t well.  Yesterday we lost him.  RIP Robert Douglas Eddy Wilson; 26.3.1953-2.8.2025.