It's been the best part of a day now, and I've spent most of it thinking about someone I never met in the flesh, but who always seemed to be there with kind words, profanities and a kick up the arse during some pretty dire times, and who was also there to whoop and holler and share the good times.
I have to say, I'm bloody gutted.
I first came here back in the Nineties, and Spaw was already a fixture. I remember once, when he asked if anyone could get hold of some bike training wheels for Tris, I though,"sod it," went out and got 'em and posted them to Ohio. The picture Pat sent me of Tris on his bike, whizzing along with the trainer wheels giving him confidence, lifted the heart. From that moment, although we were never to meet, Pat felt like the big, bad brother I never had. The sort of person my mother told me never to play with, but the sort of person you always wanted to be with.
I always entertained the notion that one day I'd go back to the USA and head off towards the middle and find this daft big brother and Karen, his long-suffering but lovely wife and Tris, his hugely-loved son, and share a few beers and maybe put him right on so many things. Now that won't happen. And that makes me sadder than I can say.
Through the years I've been a frightful curmudgeon; saying "It's just an internet forum; no-one's who they really are; we're all just binary blinks for heaven's sake," when people have gone gooey-eyed over the Mudcat, or fallen out and thrown their toys out of the pram. Every time I'd get a PM from Pat reminding me that, actually, it was much more than that. Behind every little blue name and pseudonym was a person. It's not exaggerating to say that he changed my way of viewing the online world, proving by his close friendship that I was very wrong.
And now this close friend, who I never met, has gone. And so I sit here in north London, tears running down my cheeks, in grateful appreciation of someone who demonstrated so well that basic humanity is a damned tough thing and, like bindweed, with grow through and confound any number of modern things.
As Larkin put it, and in Pat's case it's very true, "what will survive of us is love."
Goodnight old pal. Karen; stay strong, he loved you to bits. Tris; he was so proud of you. The rest of us; we were bloody lucky.