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Date: 17/09/25
The Light Dies Down
As is well enough known, the Internet can be a dangerous thing. For one thing, it can lead you down a path which, in retrospect, one ends up regretting taking.
One unsavoury habit I have picked up down the years is occasionally trying to track down people I knew way back in the when to see what became of them. Not to actually contact them, mark you; that would be a matter for them if they were remotely interested. But just to find out how things had gone for them in the subsequent years.
This was once a lot easier, when now-defunct sites like Friends Reunited were still running. Now - and because I refuse to engage with Facebook, Instagram and other such invasions of my own privacy - I have to rely on the standard-issue search engines.
This is all well and good as far as it goes, but what you end up getting depends heavily on the comparative uncommon-ness of the name you are searching for. Clearly one is doomed to failure when looking for someone called, say, 'Bill Jones'; but somewhat less common names can still be looked for if you don't mind tramping along a hundred false trails to - just possibly - find the path you were looking for.
It happened to me a couple of weeks or so ago.
First off, please read this piece I wrote twenty years ago and the piece which is linked to from the final paragraph.
I was searching for my four companions from that adventure. Well in point of fact, I was searching for one of them: I know the whereabouts of one because I'm still in regular contact with him, having worked with him for close on thirty years later on; I had a fairly good idea of the status of one of the others because he has a small on-line presence on social media; and I know I have no chance of finding the third one because his name is so statistically common (and even with his qualifications. he shares a name with someone who is occasionally on television).
The one I was searching for on this occasion has a name which is just sufficiently distinctive that there was a reasonable chance of finding him. So I put his name into DuckDuckGo (this being my search engine of choice; in effect, Google without the shit) and hit 'Send'.
The very first entry leapt out at me, as it displayed a name and year of birth. So I clicked on the link, to find that it was indeed my one-time confrère. The problem was that it also showed the date of his death, for it was a page on the website of one of the local undertakers.
I had known via the one of the group I was still in contact with that he had been very ill at one time, but had recovered. It now appeared that the wretched disease had returned (as such a condition has a tendency to do) and finally triumphed in its usual malevolent way. This happened not far short of two years ago, but I had never heard about it.
It should point out that I was lying in bed in the dark while I was doing all this, and the realisation that my memories were now flying in a 'missing man' formation was disconcerting to say the least. It had been close on forty years since I had last seen him, but had hoped that by some chance we could have connected again at some point. The regrets flooded my mind, and I thought back not only to Brimfield but to the years where we had spent a lot of time together between the ages of twelve and twenty.
A week or two later - and again referring back to those six days in Brimfield nearly a half century ago - I loaded the whole of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway on to my .mp3 player and lay in bed in the dark listening to it in much the same ambience as I had on that long lost occasion. I hadn't listened to that album all the way through in one go in at least twenty years, but such had been its impact upon me at the time that I found myself able to mouth along faithfully to the lyrics of every single track as if I had listened to it every night since 1980.
There was - as I stated in the interpolated notes in my account of that time - one track which was particularly evocative, namely the side-four instrumental entitled The Ravine. This is still one of the most atmospheric pieces in the whole of rock to me, evoking as it does lying in the dark in a tent with a gentle breeze stirring the crop in the adjacent field. I could see in that darkness, I could feel that ambience; music - in its rôle as time machine - returned it all to me in a tsunami of recognition and a similarly large wave of pensiveness on the subject of the passing of time and of all things from it.
So in honour, tribute and memory to my friend - long missed and now forever lost - here is The Ravine:
(To the memory of Alan James Howells, b. 25 December 1961, d. 16 December 2023. Goodnight, Al...)
