I was going to make this an Afterword but thought better to tell prospective readers about the antipathy of a few people towards this wonderful collection of recollections of my amazing freen’ an’ fellow traveller, also the father of my godson.

It seems that my mentioning some others in this compilation was very offensive to them, proclaiming that only their memories were worth recording, that their experiences of  The Man were the only ones to remember him by, leastways the time when they knew him. 

This precludes the fact that they weren’t around for the first 20 years that I knew JayBo from school days and university years. 

Apart from which memories are memories, no-one can own them and say they’re the only ones, trying to stop someone else from having them and recording them. The thing to do is simply enjoy them, hopefully finding out something that’s interesting about the loved one’s past which you weren’t part of. 

I also suspect there’s a bit of envy involved, wishing that they could write memories in a similar vein with the same clarity and jollity because of the great experience of the friendship. 

Or to put it more lyrically:

There are people out there who don’t like other people doing their thing, especially writing their memories or some such. Those people can take offence and tell you to stop. They can even turn nasty, causing a real writer to dig in and write more. The joke about many such folks is they don’t know what they’re getting ants in pants about, don’t know what’s twisting their knickers, don’t know why their kilts are out of kilter, why their sporrans are in spasms, why their heads are shaking out of control, why their noses have been got up  … why? Because they haven’t read anything they’re complaining about, it’s all based on a distaste for the action of someone writing their personal memories of a friend or relative or whoever. It’s automatic emotional antipathy. 

It goes further almost into the realms of the ridiculous and over the top: one of the “hindleggies” actually cut me out of his epistolary life, telling me he’d block my emails. He went further by telling his family not to communicate with me! I had to ask myself what I’d done to them to be so instructed, and worse for them to follow. I fear that this kind of “punishment” reflects more the state of mind of the punisher than saying anything about the so-called wrong-doer. A wise old friend from school days who studied medicine same as our dear departed mutual mate, wrote to me recently saying that perpetrators of nastiness usually come to regret it.

The surprising thing in this case about the tickers-off, the tut-tutters and the mouth-puckerers (actually maybe not so surprising), is they’re in their seventies. You’d think they might have been blessed with a little tolerance, even wisdom by that age, certainly the knowledge that it might be better for everyone to be as pleasant and helpful as possible.  May I never act on my disapprovals in the ways of some other people. May I have the wisdom to keep them quiet and tucked away so that I don’t aggravate bad situations of grief or whatever. Keeping low on one’s hind legs is always a good idea. 

The wild, often false imaginings of others are a plague to a writer – all the disapproval in this case has certainly been a lesson in which I’ve learned that I will not share any writings again before they’re done and dusted.  I know now it’s better to go ahead and pick up pieces later. The creation will have had the genesis and benefit of original thought, not altered and modified by others. It’s certainly what great writers in the past did.