Al Moores

 

I wrote the following yesterday, but have held the post back until today to allow Irene the space to tell folks in her own time...

This morning, our friend of over forty years, Al Moores, died. His Parkinson's finally did for him. We took Irene over to the care home and the three of us sat quietly with his body for a time, before Jane & I left her in peace with him, and to wait for Al's brother & sister-in-law to arrive. "A good man down..." is how his childhood mate, Pete, framed it, when I rang him to let him know that the inevitable had happened.

The nature of our relationship with Al was curious, to be honest, as he and Irene were an incredibly emotionally private couple, not letting much out in the open, and just dealing with stuff themselves. I suppose the glue that held the four of us together was the holy trinity of food, drink and music; the die being cast from the very first.

We met via a chance conversation about the camera and guitars visible through the front window of their house, back in 1981, when we moved into a cottage just down the road from them. It struck us that whoever lived there might just possibly be kindred spirits; anyhow, I think we were nailed, gawping, and fell into conversation with one or both of them, I don't quite recollect which.

Anyway, the upshot was that we invited them down for a meal, as by that time I'd learned to cook and the two of us were starting to experiment with different cuisines, because of our love of Indian and Chinese food. In a rush of blood to the head, we decided to have a crack at Indonesian: I've as little idea why now, or as I had then how, to cook in that style.  Anyway, we decided on Nasi Goreng with a variety of fairly fierce chilli sambals as accompaniments. Despite having access to practically none of the spices or flavourings [it was, after all, North Wales in the early '80's], we cracked on regardless.

The resulting meal, however, went down well with our newly-minted friends and a good time was had by all: particularly Al, who memorably polished off the best part of my whisky in the latter half of the evening, the totality of which has been the pattern of our friendship in the nigh-on four decades since: competitive cooking, enthusiastic drinking and good music. When we lost our rather much younger friend, Jean-Charles, a while back, his cousin described him as very much the bon viveur. We've just lost another...

Pictured L to R: Al, Irene & Jane in Corfu in 2015, when we 'dropped in' on them out of the blue for their anniversary. As always, centre stage: good food and drink...