Cardboard Spaceship

Scallywags Reunited.

A while ago, an old friend, Gerrry Miller wrote to me, and we have been in touch since to catch up on some gossip and so.  Gerry kindly pointed another old friend in the direction of the Spaceship, and so I had the pleasure of an e-mail from Keith Falconer, another a mutual friend. 

As an exercise in nostalgia, here are photos of the three of us as was. 

First me. 

Here I am as a youth, and you can see plenty of me elsewhere in the Spaceship, so I'll leave it at that. 

As you can see, perhaps 16+ years at the SAP corporate hospitality trough has not been kind to my fresh-facedness.  Or as I put it on the invite to my 40th birthday, "If I had know I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself."

Next, Mr Miller, here seen in the living room of the Newlands family abode sometime in 1983, having just come back for a visit from France. 

(I did all my photography in black and white at the time, as this was back before PCs, and we all used darkrooms, if you wanted any kind of artistic control.)

And last but not least here is Mr Keith Falconer in a similar kind of pose, telling the photographer, as I recall, to fuck off. 

Glorious days, back when I was young enough to think that I knew everything, and we were immortal, albeit on a rather tight budget... 

So, what became of us all? 

Well, me you know about, selling SAP to banks, and living in a village in Switzerland.  Gerry ended up as an artist, in Germany, near Berlin, and like me living in French a lot of the time, he does the same in German.  Keith now works for Scottish Enterprise Glasgow, as a trainer having had a polyvalent career,  "including artist, nurse, professional musician, retail management and working in the voluntary and disability sectors."

Great days, and it's wonderful how some ramblings on the web allow people to link up again. 

Degrees of Separation / Echoes of the Past

I have just had the most wonderful e-mail from an old friend of mine, whom I last met in a street in London twenty years ago.   His name is Gerry Miller, and more than almost anyone else in my life, he was the man who introduced me to the road less travelled, bringing me into contact with a bunch of people who lived a free life, a Bohemian life (albeit on on a budget) in Edinburgh, when I was a susceptible youth.   Chasing good times, girls, and eating corned beef, cabbage and tatties, in the Southside.  Sort of like trainspotting on a cuddly level. ;-)

Of all the supposed artists I have met in my life, he was the one with the raw talent to observe that impressed me the most.  His drawings always exuded something different, and personal, not to mention technical flair.  He ended up in Germany, and has a gallery here on the web, and near Berlin.  I am simply bowled over that he is around, and the fact of being able to catch up after twenty years is almost enough to make the web worthwhile in itself.

Gerry, the synchronicity of modern life has allowed us to stumble across each other again, and I, for one, am very happy about that.