wombat football

Pint Of Baileys

I don’t remember the day I first met Bar; these days I have trouble recalling what happened last week, let alone nearly twenty years ago. Despite that, I remember us playing together at primary school, and later him shooting me in the ear with a modified Super Soaker water pistol, which he’d reverse-engineered to make it more powerful. A lot more powerful.

We spent a lot of time in the woods at Kelly Bray, near his parents’ house. I’d ride up there on my car-boot-sale BMX and then we’d go and build camps in the old mine workings, cutting down branches with dangerous (“tactical”, as Bar would later have put it) implements we weren’t supposed to have taken from our Dads’ garages. Once, we stole a load of old plans from an abandoned Portakabin in the industrial estate and pretended we were spies.

I do remember being really upset when I found out he was going away to a different, “clever” secondary school (only to Tavistock, but that seemed like the other side of the world at the time). But even then, I was a little proud of him.

Years passed; distances and life in general meant we saw less of each other, but we always kept in touch. There were still the summers and holidays, when we rode our bikes and partied. It says a lot about Matt that there are a good number of experiences I can only really remember because of something he said at the time.

So when he and Oriel moved back to Devon, it was like he’d never left. We laughed to the point of crying, most weekends. I could talk to Bar about geeky things like units of measurement, lasers and computers without feeling like I was boring him—because I wasn’t, he was interested in everything.

Anyway, I could write pages and pages here. There is so much I miss about him that it’s hard to edit my words, and I still can’t find one reason why this brilliant, funny guy had to leave us; I don’t think I ever will. So wherever you are Dr B: here’s to you and the life you led, from all of us who love you, and the many, many friends who’ll never forget you. Cheers.