From September 1985 to August 1987 I lived in the village of Otham in Kent, specifically in Hollytree House, a cottage situated on the imaginatively named Otham Street. Hollytree House was student accommodation and cost me a tenner a week in rent, sharing with four others. I lived in student accommodation because I was a student taking a three-year degree course at Maidstone College of Art. My subject was fine art, specialising in film and video. I was taking the degree mainly because I'd had no other better defined direction in which to proceed after I left school.
My three years came to an end without my having formulated any clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life beyond that I knew what I didn't want to do; and unfortunately, as with both joining the army and working at McDonalds, it had turned out that fine art was one of the things I didn't want to do. Nor did I have much enthusiasm for working in television, the route taken by many others on my course, most of whom were significantly more motivated than myself. I'd discovered that I liked playing in a rock band and I enjoyed comic books - both reading and drawing them - none of which seemed likely to form the basis of a career.
The final term was fun while I managed to avoid dwelling on my distinctly uncertain and potentially miserable future out there in the big, bad world of rent, dole, and job centres. I knew the rude awakening was coming. Once college had finished, I stayed on at Hollytree House for as long as I could manage, although I knew I'd have to be out by October. I didn't want to move back in with my parents for obvious reasons, and yet I was scared to go forward, fearing whichever direction I took would almost certainly leave me beached somewhere I didn't want to be. Simultaneous to this, friends I'd made at college seemed to drift away. There were exceptions, but persons I'd considered myself on good terms with seemed distant, almost as though they were unable to work out what I was doing on their doorstep. I felt like the creepy older kid still turning up at the school gates long after leaving.
As might be gleaned from the above, I may not have been a whole lot of fun to hang around with; and my increasing sense of distance from the college environment brought a realisation, namely that I hadn't actually liked many of my fellow students in the first place. It wasn't that I actively disliked them, but we'd never had much in common. I didn't care about their world, or their aspirations, or that which they held to be of value. I found them self-involved. They had too much faith in the art world, in contemporary art, and realms about which no-one sane gave a flying fuck.
So my friends were people I came to know through art college, or because I was there in Maidstone at that time rather than because we ate sandwiches at the same government subsidised refectory. A couple of these friends were people I knew from the White Horse, which was the village pub. Technically they were townies, as my fellow students would have referred to them, meaning they were of local origin, worked in regular jobs and probably didn't care a whole lot about abstract expressionism. You could probably substitute the term working class for townies without changing the relationship.
My time at Hollytree House was characterised by my sharing with four girls - as I would have deemed them at the time. I was myself too lacking in either maturity or testosterone-driven confidence to constitute a threat, or so I imagine, and I never tried to cop off with any of them because I never tried to cop off with anyone for the duration of those three years. Even had it seemed like a good idea, which it didn't, I wouldn't have known where to start. This domestic arrangement suited me, and I appreciated being spared the usual macho bullshit generated when you share a kitchen with young men. Naturally, everyone at the local pub was in love with the girls of Hollytree House, usually from afar, and being the token male I was often regarded as someone who might effect an introduction without it seeming too creepy. I never did because it almost always was too creepy. Some of the locals speculated on the topic of what I must get up to surrounded by all that fanny, as they delightfully put it; although half the time I was up the pub because I needed a break from the girl talk.
My townie friends at the pub were Bob, Dave, Mark, and Dez by default because he tended to hang out with the other three. Dez, who resembled Dickie Davies, was usually too drunk to form words and spent most of the time sat grinning and chuckling at a table, occasionally crooning People are Strange by the Doors in response to whatever had been said to him. Bob was, by his own terrifically blunt description, a cripple, having suffered from childhood polio which left him either on crutches or in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It seemed fair to say that he hadn't had it easy, but his hardship had left him both socially fearless and blessed with a caustic sense of humour. Dave was a smartly dressed wide boy who worked at the local branch of Topman. He was only a few years older than me and was very funny, and we became close enough for the exchange of Christmas cards. I'm fairly sure I remember his initiating our friendship with a monologue along the lines of art and all that stuff you do - it's all bollocks innit, and I couldn't actually disagree. Our friendship was fortified by my ability to quote the lyrics of New Model Army's Vengeance in full, which impressed Dave no end.
'Here, come and listen to this,' he said to some hairy biker stood at the bar. This was Mark. He was roughly the same age, wore a leather jacket, and seemed as though he might be handy in a fight.
'What?' he said, looking unusually bored.
Dave pressed me to recite the lyrics to Vengeance a second time. After a minute of coaxing, I conceded because a refusal would have been even more embarrassing.
'Gets a thousand pound fine after months in court, while the lawyers get fat and the law gets bought,' I eventually concluded, voice wobbling like I was at school and had been told to read in front of the entire class.
'That's great, innit,' said Dave. 'Proper song!'
'What a load of bollocks,' Mark observed drily, not actually sounding like he cared either way.
'Don't you think those are great words?' Dave tried again.
'No, I don't.'
Somehow the ice was broken. Mark joined us at our table and we drank some more. I don't remember what we talked about because it was thirty fucking years ago, but there was a lot of laughter and we became good friends. It was unexpected because I'd grown up in a town full of bikers back in the Midlands, which hadn't left me well-disposed towards their type; and this guy was the real thing, but he was smart, and he was funny, and he was great company. It turned out he knew exactly what I was talking about when I told him about the denim clad spotty twats of my childhood in as diplomatic terms as I could muster. He had his own little gang of such kids as acolytes, mostly riding fizzies - junior's first motorbike in the late seventies, the one which makes a noise like a sewing machine. They followed him around and treated him like a guru, forever asking him to describe memorable road accidents and so on.
At the time I was busily writing and drawing a comic strip wherein the Dovers - the band for which I thrashed a guitar - had ludicrous escapades involving plots to take over the world, angry Gods, and the like. My fictitious version of the Dovers were managed by Richard Nixon, former president of the United States and now tenant of a bedsit in Lewisham, but most of the characters were people I knew; and Mark began to appear in the strip because he was a laugh and I didn't know many people who were. The continuing story - all made up as I went along, ran to about sixty or seventy pages before I ran out of steam. I'd intended to publish it as a series of fanzines but never got around to it, which was probably for the best.
One evening, I nervously showed Mark a few pages of the strip because he was in it and I'd recycled a few of his jokes. Amazingly he was flattered and thought it was great, at which point he mentioned his love of Paul Sample's Ogri, a strip which once appeared in the back of Bike magazine. It turned out that we both loved Ogri. My dad had read Bike regularly when I was a kid, and I always nicked his copy after he'd finished which, with hindsight, was probably what set me on the path to drawing comics in the first place.
In response to my strips, Mark read me some of his poetry. It came as a real surprise that he wrote poetry. I knew a couple of poets and they all seemed a bit neurotic, whereas Mark was more like an amiable Viking, someone who surely didn't need to write poetry but did it anyway. Anyway, I recall it as being very powerful, and enough so for me to get over my dislike of poetry, generally speaking.
This guy was a dark horse. He had hidden depths. The bikers I knew back in school days were mostly arseholes defined by the same patches sewn on all their denim jackets - logos of heavy metal bands occasionally drawn on by hand and spelled wrong if they couldn't get the patches - Judes Preist, Motohead, States Quo and the usual suspects; and if you weren't in their gang then you were almost certainly gay. They made it very easy for me to decide whether I really wanted to move away from the town in which I grew up.
Yet Mark was somehow sprung from a different branch of the same tree, and I realised there was something to that whole deal about not judging books by their covers. Mark thought about things. He didn't seem to care about running with the crowd or having a fave band as your entire identity.
After Otham, I moved to Chatham but we stayed in touch for a while. Mark asked me to paint something on his garage door. It was decorated with a bottle of Newcastle brown ale which he'd painted on there a few years before. It impressed the hell out of me but Mark felt it was time for a change.
So one Sunday - October, 1987 from what I can work out, I went over to his home in Senacre Woods on the outskirts of Maidstone and, for want of any better ideas, spent the day painting a series of non-sequiturs in a cartoon form drawn from the comic strips I'd shown him.
I wasn't really sure what I was doing, but it seemed to go okay. Mark spent the day working on his bike just a few feet away, so we doubtless talked bollocks for the duration. I paused every so often to assess my progress, and also for a fag - cigarette breaks being an essential part of the creative process.
'That's the problem with this sort of work,' Mark observed in philosophical spirit as he stepped back from the bike to wipe oil from his hands. 'You keep forgetting to smoke.'
We lit up, and contemplated my efforts on his garage door. I felt a bit of a fraud and half expected my patron to ask, what the fuck were you thinking?, but somehow it was exactly what he'd wanted. It was a long day, but pleasant and satisfying just as the right sort of labour should be. It probably wasn't equivalent to that Pope asking Michelangelo for something nice on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but it was fun, and I liked creating art for someone who obviously appreciated it.
We lost touch soon after. I ended up moving around a lot over the next couple of years and lost touch with a lot of people, and by the time I'd noticed that Mark was among them, it seemed too late to do anything about it.
Thirty or so years later, I'm living in San Antonio, Texas, and the internet is a thing. Of all the long lost friends I'd managed to track down on social media, Mark remained frustratingly elusive; so it was a great day when he resurfaced on facebook, or when I resurfaced on facebook, depending on how you look at it. So much time had passed that I don't think we knew where to start, so we didn't, instead settling into the routine of occasional jovial exchanges. He'd changed, but not in a bad way, and he was still a warm, funny guy - one of those rare people you somehow can't imagine being disliked by anyone. We looked at pictures of each other's cats, and all of the usual thing. He asked me to design a tattoo for him but I never got around to it. I've never really understood tattoos and the idea that some shit I might come up with would be reproduced on an actual person felt like a lot of pressure, at least compared to painting over a lovingly rendered bottle of brown ale on a garage door.
More recently, I made vague plans to go and see him when I was back in England but it never worked out.
Now, as it has turned out, he's gone. I'm not sure I even realised he was ill. It seems incredible that one can be hit so hard by the passing of a person you haven't seen in decades, but I guess he made an unusually good impression.
There's not much more I can say.
He was my friend and it was a privilege to have known him.
It turns out that the above is more or less a rewrite of a more detailed post from eight years ago (when Mark was still with us but before he'd resurfaced on facebook) which, should anyone care, can be found here. This probably goes some way towards explaining why this is the first post on this blog in over a year.
