Further thoughts on Colin Doyle

From an e.mail to my friend Yvonne Strachan ...

I’ve been trying to write something for a couple of days but it’s an odd exercise in a way.  Memories, as in hard and fast recollections of events, times and places, are less easy to set down in a meaningful way than to think of the feelings that bubbled up to the surface when I read that he’d left the world into which we’re all born.  There was immense sadness, of course.  But that immediate reaction was quickly supplemented by an echo of the fun, banter, laughter of our engagements; his sometimes mad schemes and what I think of (then and now) as Colin’s Peter Pan-like enthusiasm for virtually everything he touched: his beloved Arsenal; the rich vitality of London at its best; the potential of building membership benefits in the NUS card (of all unlikely things); his time running coaches for Galleon; wine; his apartment in The Barbican; those 1970s suits with wide lapels; laughing at someone’s outrageous stories in a bar full of overconfident bright young things who intended to re-shape the universe (some of whom may even have achieved some of those intentions); telling his own tall tales; his giant white Audi 100 car that her knew he ought not to possess but which he couldn’t resist.

Our last e.mail exchanges were filled with the unmistakable affection, pride, love, exasperation of a father for his children who clearly meant just about everything to him.  He wrote as he spoke, as I think he lived; seventeen to the dozen, never in a straight line but with exuberance and optimism forever.  I think I met him for the first time when I was a sabbatical officer at Stirling University, so that’s 77 or (more likely) 78.  We were in a bar (as almost seems inescapably likely for that period) in CC2 (as it was known).  Like the first contact with some people one meets (I have been more fortunate than others in that regard) he captured a place in my heart immediately.  I miss him and always shall, which is no bad thing.

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