Peter..? 17 12 3 (15) 25 1 30
Yesterday was the day of the funeral for my friend
Peter whom I wrote about following his death 17 10 29.
It was a splendid funeral because one got to meet a
good number of his other friends and also a good number of his closest
relatives: his two sisters who were present, the younger J with her husband H
and her elder sister B whom I had met only briefly, and perhaps not in the best
of circumstances, and his brother's two sons who were seated to my left at the
reception later in a nearby restaurant, learning in the process that P was the
eldest of their parents 4 siblings. We missed meeting his only brother who was
present for the funeral service, but who skipped the reception for whatever
reason...
Going back to my first meeting with P in 2009 at
the boat yard where we stored our two sister vessels over the winter months,
October to May, between the years 2009 to 2012, when I sold my yacht, and
thereafter when I would make myself available to help P with the operations of
bringing her to the landing stage to have her lifted out of the sea, and then
prepare her for storage over the winter, finally draping her with a cover to
protect her from the elements: snow wind and rain, etc. Ferrying his yacht from
his island retreat where he moored her in the same area as the motor boats he
used variously to ferry provisions and people between his island and the
mainland a distance of 2 or 3 km say 2 miles.
From the outset as the guy who had kept his yacht
at the same boat yard since 1993 P deferred to me as a person of superior
practical skills, which may have been marginally so, but on a sliding scale I
knew I wasn't the most practical of people, my brother J for example by turns a
fitter in a metalwork shop, a tool-maker in the tool room of a major mechanical
engineering company etc., etc., etc., and the guy I could always turn to for
help with practical jobs like stripping the engine of my motor
cycle down for de-cokes, or replacing gears in its gear box...
But nevertheless it is always interesting when two
friends share common interests and can be there to help one another in
practical ways... Associated with these practical jobs to do with our shared
hobby of sailing we began to meet up for our espresso coffee get-togethers and
if I was the more practical person who he always deferred to, he was the more
intellectual with a phenomenal memory for everything that had ever happened in
his life, everything he had ever read, and a vast knowledge of Scandinavian law
and economics from his studies in University where his main subjects were Economics and Politics,
and also from a life-long career in which he got to represent his country in
International Conferences and the like. Plus of course the influences of his
father who was active in Amnesty International and who served in WW ll as a
Colonel.
As I got to know P better we would meet
up more and more when he came to our town during the winter months to visit his
summer cottage, when the ice was strong enough to support a man on skies
pulling a sledge over the surface snow. During several winters then I became a frequent daytime guest as his cottage.
Until his health in the later years deteriorated to
the extent he was no longer able to do these things as before, and he became increasingly
reliant on the help of others, like when he was no longer able to drive a car I
would collect him from the railway station and take him to his landing stage
where he would set out hauling his sledge.
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