Two days ago, a good friend from England died, quite suddenly. His name is Andy, and he turned 32 just a few days ago. I knew him because he was the best friend of someone with whom I spent six years on-and-off in a relationship with, and because we have several mutual friends amongst that group. Their grief is undoubtedly greater than my own, and their hurt makes me very very sad.
Andy was a big friendly giant of a paradox: on the one hand, a pot-smoking, sometimes-lazy, laid-back-to-the-point-of-lying-down fella with a big heart; on the other, a super-smart, quick-thinking, emotionally intelligent computer programmer who played the sharpest game of Trivial Pursuit I’ve ever seen. It was a good job he smoked weed or his brilliant brain would’ve sprouted out of his ears.
[It strikes me that using a blog (or indeed Facebook or Twitter or any other social networking tool) in these situations feels somewhat inappropriate. Macabre, even. Surely death should be confined to weightier, more lasting media, like letters? But we live in the age of communication, and I am a writer. So I guess my way of dealing with this is to do what I do in every situation: write. And in whatever medium that may take.]
On the day that I heard of Andy’s death, I didn’t want to be at home alone all evening. I arranged to meet a girlfriend in Amsterdam who – by sheer terrible coincidence – had lost a friend under very similar circumstances just two weeks before. I considered what I knew about Andy’s taste in restaurants; it had to be a curry house or a good old-fashioned pub. I couldn’t face the bright, exotic façade of a Thai restaurant, preferring to cocoon myself in the candle-lit gloaming and cosy warmth of a bruincafé – Holland’s answer to an old English pub. In some ironic strike by the universe, it happened to be remembrance day in the Netherlands, and at 8 o’clock the café observed two minutes’ silence to remember the dead. It was the first time those two minutes had really meant anything to me in all the years I’ve witnessed them.
Memories of Andy firmly in mind, I ordered steak – it seemed like the kind of thing he would have picked and, ridiculous as it sounds, that seemed important. I feel guilty towards Het Molenpad (the café) at this point, because this is possibly the least impartial review I’ve ever written. I’ll try to be objective and say that the mashed potatoes were excellent, but the steak was under-seasoned and a little tough; the stewed cabbage was good, but the roast tomato bland. It was an average meal, but the circumstances were so far from average that there’s very little more I can say.
By rights I should’ve ordered a beer (an English ale, in fact, though those are hard to come by in Dutch cafés), although Andy knew how to appreciate a glass of red wine too (and, more famously, a mojito) so I think he would’ve approved. The glass that I raised, like this post, was for him: To absent friends, who will be much missed.
