07/08/1958- 02/06/2025

I'd had a plan: I would come round to your house on public transport, and we'd climb into your partner's car: she would be coming too. 

Those south London suburbs would be slow and local; we'd pass people with carrier bags full of shopping, old geezers chatting in the sunshine, fags in hand; women with pushchairs and toddlers in tow and men in hi-vis jackets behind garish coloured plastic barriers, digging noisily between big muddy clay piles. 

Soon, we'd feel the roads change as the motorway approached some way after Coulsden South. We'd see the big pale blue sky looming in front of us, and feel the change in the road surface. We'd hear the swish of cars and lorries as they passed and we'd chat in fragments of travel conversation, in bits and pieces. 

We'd see fields from time to time, in between slabs of woodland waving at us as we passed: big dark rippling trees that don't mind traffic, standing in defiance and saying: 'We'll still be here when you've gone, humans'.

Through the early Brighton suburbs we'd glide, so familiar in places from our time living there, but we'd not drive into the centre. Turn left, because we're going to look at the sea from the cliffs. 

We'd look at you anxiously from the corners of our eyes as memories pass through your mind and you speak of past times, bittersweet and funny. I'd think of life's mangle that spat you out to gradually re-form into the future man, the man with a family and pride and dignity that you earned over years of self-determination and strength of mind.

Here we are at the sea, sitting on a bench at the edge of a cliff. The air is sweet and fresh with oxygen, wind direction: undecided. Pesky gulls walk off in disgust when they realise we're not going to feed them. Up there in the sky their brothers and sisters soar beautifully, glittering in the sun. 'We are the history of gulls, our flying patterns learned through millennia, routes planned by nature, living our brutal life and breeding and dying, repeat ad infinitum', they would think if the mechanics of existence allowed them time to ponder.

We have stopped talking now and we look at the line where the sea meets the sky, the line of hope where anything can happen. We breathe, we exist, we feel peace amongst all the chaos. Everything bad that happened has gone, and only good exists.

In my head I sit there with you in companionship, and know that nothing could break the tie between us. This was a journey we never made, but my imagination has taken me there this morning. I love you, James.