Still Not Making Sense
Loch Bracadale, September 2024 © Mark Howitt
Soon after I got home on that crisp October afternoon, I received a text message that simply read: “We’re at number 12”.
Not recognising the phone number - nor the significance of the number 12 - I assumed it had been misdirected and ignored it. But a short while later, something made me think that maybe it was from Roland. This suggested he had a new phone number or perhaps two mobile phones. Sometimes I feel as if having one is one too many.
A few hours before, returning home on the bus, I’d texted Roland a photograph of Andrea taken the previous year. She’s sitting on the deck of the Hen House, back to the camera, wrapped up against the chill of a September morning, head buried in a book, cup of coffee to hand and, stretching out in the background, the sun kissed beauty of Loch Bracadale. By a quick bit of internet sleuthing, I had established that the “number 12” was the croft on the Isle of Skye that Anna and Roland had recently bought and was pretty much next door (or as next door as things can be in rural Scotland) to the Hen House, the house in which Andrea and I have now spent four gloriously happy summer holidays.
I’d bumped into Anna and Roland at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary earlier that day. I was on my way to a physiotherapy appointment following a cycling accident the previous month, Roland to get results of a CT scan. I’d heard that Roland had recently been unwell - a “mystery virus” as a friend, or perhaps Roland himself, had described it - but at the time of our meeting, I didn’t connect that with the CT scan. I couldn’t with any certainty say when I had last seen Roland - maybe at the start of summer - but that afternoon he looked well, he looked like Roland, and as always, he was on fine form.
We chatted about them relocating to Skye, a brave move having lived in the city for so long, but their home had been the Isle of Raasay all those years before, they knew what they were doing, and seemed like something they - and their family - were destined to do. Anna started to explain where the croft was but with a smile I said there was no need. If she had asked, I could have told her the location of every hairpin bend, every passing place on the road from Carbost to number 12.
Roland said how much he’d enjoyed my most recent piece of writing, a review (that word used in its loosest sense) of Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme's iconic 1984 film of a Talking Heads concert. Roland loved Talking Heads, had seen the film several times when it first came out and again recently on this its 40th anniversary re-release. I thanked him, adding that the next step was to generate an income from my writing. “Good luck with that,” he said, laughing in that contagious way he had always done since we had first met at primary school.
Five minutes and that was it, we both had medical appointments to keep. Anna promised to make Andrea and me a cup of tea next time we were on Skye. My parting words to Roland were: “Keep in touch.”
But we never did. Only two weeks later - not even that - dear Roland was gone, nothing that anyone could have done. 12 months on, it’s still hard to believe. He was one of the good guys.
At one point during Stop Making Sense, singer David Byrne - drenched in sweat, eyes bugged out, waving his microphone towards the camera - shouts to a delirious audience at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre, “Does anybody have any questions?” I have a question, a question unasked because I know there can never be an answer. Or not an answer that makes any sense, not an answer that reconciles that inconsequential meeting and the decades of friendship that preceded it with the fact that Roland is no longer with us.
We never know when our time might be up, but until it is, all we can do is cling on to those that we love and still have and keep in touch.
My chest is aching, and it burns like a furnace
The burning keeps me alive
For Roland, 24.11.1965 - 01.11.2023 🌳