Sidmouth folk festival was my second home for many years. Today I visited it for the first time outside of festival season. It was a beautifully sunny day, so it was very busy. Nowhere near as busy as festival time, but busy enough to remind me of it.
Yesterday I was listening to a Russell Brand podcast; he was interviewing Theresa Cheung and she mentioned that when people have near death experiences, it’s been documented that they are visited by people who have died, and sometimes it’s someone that the person didn’t know had died until they researched later, like a childhood friend they’d lost touch with. In that moment when she spoke about this, my old friend Doug flashed through my mind.
Doug lived up the road from me, our paths had crossed briefly during after school gymnastics classes but he was in show off mode then and we never connected. A few years later we finally met properly at Sidmouth festival. It is possible we met when I was 14; that was the year my parents were performing in Corryvrechan. I think it is more likely that we must have met when I was 15, because a year later I was 16 and working spotlights with him at the arena showground. In the meantime I had spent a large amount of my gcse revision time hanging out with him… mostly at the cinema that was being brought back to life, down at the Ram Inn, and in the White Lion pub. We spent 2 years spotlighting a wide variety of performances at the showground every night, but one evening in the last year one of the spots wasn’t working and Doug let me have the night off, so I got to go see Shooglenifty’s roots night at the Bulverton and decided I wanted more of that, so the following year I transferred to the dance tent and got to spend plenty of evenings bouncing about dancing the night away as a result. I remember we were still good friends when I went away to uni, but drifted after that. Years later I asked his brother for his mobile phone number, having an urge to get in touch as he’d reached the mighty heights of 40 years, but I never did get round to contacting him, and then all of a sudden I heard that he’d passed away from a terminal illness. Didn’t even know he was ill.
Today as I was driving through Sidmouth to meet with a friend, seeing all the landmarks reminding me of the times we’d done fun and/or foolish things together. That place is full of so many memories, but his were the ones that came back to me. Felt a bit out of sorts sitting on the beach, picking up stones and remembering when he and his brother drew characters on a bunch of stones and tried to convince me and my sister that they’d sold some. (We weren’t convinced.) A couple more times it felt like his presence came back, then as I left my friend to walk back to the car I headed towards the place where we’d found a pound coin on the floor, just after we’d first kissed. He spoke the words ‘see a pound coin pick it up…’ and I heard them again in my head after all these years. I don’t know what I was hoping to find there; another pound coin? an abandoned lottery ticket? Turns out, it was tears and release. Told him I was sorry that our lives had drifted apart, sorry I’d never got back in touch, that I wanted to go back to us being young again so I could reach out and touch him again… and I heard him tell me not to be so daft, said with fondness and love. All is fine. And in that moment his energy reminded me I’ve always been attracted to the wonderfully crazy ones, the ones a little bit out of the ordinary. And that there’s delicious magic in the making when that love is nurtured. Thanks you. Maybe I don’t need a near death experience to receive the words you have to offer up to me. I shall listen when you call again. Much love.