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And those weird China blues never go away
As I mentioned, Mabel didn't compete at DERT this year as one member of the team was at a wake. The formal funeral was on the Friday before, and (unsure whether it was going to be a close-friends-only affair) I'd enquired tentatively whether I could go along. It was in London, I figured I could slide out of the office for a couple of hours and show my face.
I didn't know Charlie all that well - he was someone I just saw on pub crawls. But talking nonsense with people in pubs is something I love doing, and I shall miss him at our next London bash.
Katie seemed really pleased that I'd like to go, and doubly so because it meant there'd be a Mabel representative there. (In the recent order of Mabel Gubbins t-shirts, there was one set aside for Charlie).
Walking up to East London Crematorium, someone on the gates was enquiring of mourners which funeral they were there for. (East London Crem. is a machine of a place, with two chapels and a staggered[*] service schedule). Fortunately, the couple in front of me said a name and I could just say "yup, same" as it dawned on me that I had no idea what Charlie's surname was. It had never seemed important - he was simply Charlie, you know Charlie, small bloke, huge Alsatian dog.
I had no idea, until it was read out as part of the eulogy, that he'd once had an antiques stall on the Portobello Road. That he'd designed and built furniture - he built a replica of Napoleon's bed for Adam Ant, and carried out a seemingly endless list of bizarre one-offs for the famous and infamous. (How did he get these commissions, someone once asked him. "What you have to understand," he apparently replied, "is that everyone else is rubbish.") I didn't know that he'd ridden motorbikes, or lectured at an art school.
I also had no idea just how many people would be there for his funeral. The chapel was small, with seats for perhaps 50 or 60 people. Even with people standing up the side and round the back, the crowd of mourners still trailed out the door. His brothers were there - one of them looking disturbingly like him. Or, as I overheard someone saying, "like the clean-living Charlie, the one who eats three square meals a day and doesn't smoke like a chimney". But mostly it was friends. Friends from his college days, dug up on the internet at short notice. Neighbours from Limehouse Basin. Drinkers in his local. People into whose lives he'd breezed, and then stuck. The number of people to whom a family celebration just wasn't a family celebration if Charlie wasn't there was staggering.
It was strange how many people had first met him because he offered them assistance. "I met Charlie when we got a barge wedged in the canal and he popped out of a boat hatch with a huge length of chain to drag it round". His friends knew they could count on his help; when someone got a mobile home stuck on a bridge in Dorset, Charlie drove down from London with welding gear, cut the railings off the bridge, freed the vehicle, and then re-welded the bridge back together.
At the same time, no one was ever surprised if he turned up for an event on the wrong day. Or didn't turn up at all. On the night he died, he didn't show up in the pub as expected and no one thought anything of it. I was constantly reminded of a description I heard of someone else years ago: you could trust him with your life, but not with anything less important.
Afterwards, jammed into a tiny pub in the East End, people swapped stories. The pub's TV looped a huge collection of pictures of Charlie that someone had been collecting in Dropbox, constantly inspiring anecdotes of the man who never seemed to worry. When I left to head back to the office, people were settling in for the day.
Although many people agreed that Charlie could be infuriating in many ways, everyone loved him. And to me, the stories were a reminder that many of us could benefit from being more like him: worry less, take more risks, be open to anything that comes along. Help strangers. Talk to people. Be a friend.
As it says in the song: The only measure of your words and your deeds is the love you leave behind when you're done.
[*] Due to the staggering, and the open doors of the chapel, I know that the previous funeral in the other chapel closed with the playing of The Day We Caught The Train by Ocean Colour Scene, and the next one opened with Muse. Though I doubt I'd want Muse at my funeral, I find it a lot more explicable than Ocean Colour Scene ;)
I didn't know Charlie all that well - he was someone I just saw on pub crawls. But talking nonsense with people in pubs is something I love doing, and I shall miss him at our next London bash.
Katie seemed really pleased that I'd like to go, and doubly so because it meant there'd be a Mabel representative there. (In the recent order of Mabel Gubbins t-shirts, there was one set aside for Charlie).
Walking up to East London Crematorium, someone on the gates was enquiring of mourners which funeral they were there for. (East London Crem. is a machine of a place, with two chapels and a staggered[*] service schedule). Fortunately, the couple in front of me said a name and I could just say "yup, same" as it dawned on me that I had no idea what Charlie's surname was. It had never seemed important - he was simply Charlie, you know Charlie, small bloke, huge Alsatian dog.
I had no idea, until it was read out as part of the eulogy, that he'd once had an antiques stall on the Portobello Road. That he'd designed and built furniture - he built a replica of Napoleon's bed for Adam Ant, and carried out a seemingly endless list of bizarre one-offs for the famous and infamous. (How did he get these commissions, someone once asked him. "What you have to understand," he apparently replied, "is that everyone else is rubbish.") I didn't know that he'd ridden motorbikes, or lectured at an art school.
I also had no idea just how many people would be there for his funeral. The chapel was small, with seats for perhaps 50 or 60 people. Even with people standing up the side and round the back, the crowd of mourners still trailed out the door. His brothers were there - one of them looking disturbingly like him. Or, as I overheard someone saying, "like the clean-living Charlie, the one who eats three square meals a day and doesn't smoke like a chimney". But mostly it was friends. Friends from his college days, dug up on the internet at short notice. Neighbours from Limehouse Basin. Drinkers in his local. People into whose lives he'd breezed, and then stuck. The number of people to whom a family celebration just wasn't a family celebration if Charlie wasn't there was staggering.
It was strange how many people had first met him because he offered them assistance. "I met Charlie when we got a barge wedged in the canal and he popped out of a boat hatch with a huge length of chain to drag it round". His friends knew they could count on his help; when someone got a mobile home stuck on a bridge in Dorset, Charlie drove down from London with welding gear, cut the railings off the bridge, freed the vehicle, and then re-welded the bridge back together.
At the same time, no one was ever surprised if he turned up for an event on the wrong day. Or didn't turn up at all. On the night he died, he didn't show up in the pub as expected and no one thought anything of it. I was constantly reminded of a description I heard of someone else years ago: you could trust him with your life, but not with anything less important.
Afterwards, jammed into a tiny pub in the East End, people swapped stories. The pub's TV looped a huge collection of pictures of Charlie that someone had been collecting in Dropbox, constantly inspiring anecdotes of the man who never seemed to worry. When I left to head back to the office, people were settling in for the day.
Although many people agreed that Charlie could be infuriating in many ways, everyone loved him. And to me, the stories were a reminder that many of us could benefit from being more like him: worry less, take more risks, be open to anything that comes along. Help strangers. Talk to people. Be a friend.
As it says in the song: The only measure of your words and your deeds is the love you leave behind when you're done.
[*] Due to the staggering, and the open doors of the chapel, I know that the previous funeral in the other chapel closed with the playing of The Day We Caught The Train by Ocean Colour Scene, and the next one opened with Muse. Though I doubt I'd want Muse at my funeral, I find it a lot more explicable than Ocean Colour Scene ;)
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Impressive! And not nearly as bonkers as I initially thought when I misread that as "mobile phone". ;-)