The first time he phones it’s early in the week and I don’t answer. I’m not expecting to hear from him on a workday and sometimes his kids get hold of his phone. A few days later he phones again and again I don’t answer. The third time, no, there’s no third time, no Peter-and-the-cock-crows-thrice tidy metaphor here. At the end of the week, it’s me who phones. His wife answers and the news she has is the kind you really need to be sitting down for.

I don’t give the eulogy; his oldest boy does, gran at his shoulder and turning the pages for him. Best of luck following that, says the Vicar as she introduces me. And there in the front row is his wife, his four boys, his mum, his dad, his sister. This is a please-no-black-attire funeral and my shirt’s as red as Moira Shearer’s ballet pumps in The Red Shoes. I hold tight to the lectern determined that it won’t dance me round the room.

Picture a rainy day in Scotland, I say, dreich being the word (a word I wish to sound exotic in a Church of England hall) and we’re on the Isle of Mull, driving back to the ferry. This is the year Kinnock loses the election to Major, I say, and P has yet to out himself. (Pause.) As a Wycombe Wanders supporter, I say. (I pause again and look up from the page, trying but failing not to catch anyone’s eye.)

The car radio is playing Kirsty MacColl’s cover of a Ray Davies song. (As I say it I relive it like it was if not yesterday exactly then last month or next Wednesday or the date on a calendar page to be blown away in the frame of a Hollywood cliché. And I quote the lyric:) “I’m thinking of the days, I won’t forget a single day, believe me.”

From that holiday, no more than a long weekend really, lingers the magic of memory. Playing pool, slotting coins in the jukebox – that’s how long ago this was – climbing half a Munro. (I’m all for retrospective heckling of oneself. WTAF is half a Munro?) One evening we even find ourselves helping a frog across the road. (Sure it wasn’t a toad, you eejit?) A magical Spring Watch moment. And who’d guess 25 years later P would be Astro-turfing his back garden?

(I pause again but don’t think I lift my head this time.) I first met him at high school in the early eighties. The cleverest kid in the class. He was the one the economics teacher would hand the chalk to and plead—“Can you help us out here, P?” He always could.

(I shift my tone and quote the man himself, having checked our texts.) Recently I sought his views on our eldest’s flirtation with investments—“Bitcoin huh? The class A of the punting world!” Before Christmas, P asked me if Celtic would win the league. (This was the season cut short by COVID.) We were having a wobbly spell and the odds were unusually favourable. But win we did – by 13 points. Be sure and find that betting slip. (The lectern wants to dance again but I’m not humouring Powell and Pressburger today.)

In 2009 P encouraged me to come and see Celtic play Hapoel Tel Aviv. A ridiculous idea for a Guardian reader. (I don’t say this was between intifadas or that I’d run the idea past a friend involved in the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.) I booked my flight. After a 2-1 defeat, he took me for a consolation drink. We sipped ice-cold Guinness, watching the Mediterranean waves – and discussing, you know, kids, work, music, geo-politics, Oxford United. (I feel my shoulders start to loosen.)

The last time I didn’t see P was last May. It was the day of the school fete and timings weren’t quite working out. Then a text—“I’m in the pub near the station having a quiet pint with the pooch.”

I replied—“Ach, just jumped on the train…next time!”

Next time…(This one is the longest pause yet.)

When he asked me in ’99 to be his best man for a second time, I said “sure – but don’t go expecting a hattrick”. (Now second longest.) But here I am giving a speech again…

What I don’t say in the church but what I replay in my head, sometimes when walking on Portobello beach with Aphex Twin or Alice Coltrane in my ears, is P driving us in a 4x4 down that winding Israeli highway towards the Dead Sea, his and my boys bickering in the back, him and me drinking takeaway coffee, him conducting a work conference call with his boss, holding a conversation with me about whatever nonsense was on my mind, now and then turning around to remonstrate with the boys, doing all this simultaneously, at least in my glitching memory of this scene.

How he does this I don’t know but in the words of the Kink and wizard of Muswell Hill—“Life is what you conjure.” ■

Rodger Evans