Wednesday 31 October 2012

Tomorrow is a Myth

IMG_1044 by Lillput
IMG_1044, a photo by Lillput on Flickr.
Two weeks ago something dreadful happened.

My great pal, and business partner, TD died very suddenly at home one day.

It's taken me these two weeks to properly process this very simple fact - that Tim is simply no longer here.

I've known him for a little over five years but what a five years those have been.

I met him about six months after the departure of Idiot Boy. I was in a pretty bad way but my preservation instinct told me to get up and out and meet new people.

Tim was the first person I met in a one to one situation, over ginger beer and spag bol one lunchtime nearby where we both worked.

Lunchtime coffee and photography became a regular feature for all the time we worked in nearby offices.

We were never more than friends - but certainly never less. We went onto found our company together following a conversation about his wish, given infinite wealth, to have a practice of his own.

Although we were never financially successful, I refuse to only judge the value of our work by that alone. We helped influence thinking on temporary regeneration and the importance of it to communities. We gave people ideas about how people who are excluded from society can be included and encouraged to contribute. Tim was behind most of the ideas.

I'm a very different person to the woman I was when I first met Tim - and Tim was a very different man. Both of us grew in confidence in dealing with other people in a business - and in a personal sense. Both of us learned loads about how local authorities, funding bodies and other
organizations work.

If he'd been less fun, less unintimidating when we first met, then chances are I would have written off meeting people via internet means (in our case Flickr) as unworkable and too scary.

As a direct result of that meeting I gained the confidence to explore meeting other people - and I met S.

Not only that but Tim's influences led me to expland my horizons to include Velvet Underground, The Fall, Michael Clarke, Pina Bausch, event photography, my Nikon D300, the deeper aspects of architecture and construction, musing on the height of Patrick Moore's waistband, Chicken with ginger, the whereabouts of Socotra, and the list goes on.

The picture on this post is a case in point: his eye for detail made me write down the details of this particular sort of fencepost that surrounded the Wish Tower in Eastbourne. He thought it could be interesting to find out a little more about them at some point.
So I was on holiday in Cornwall with S when I saw this rusty version, somewhat randomly, in a nature reserve. I took the picture to send to Tim thinking he'd find it mildy interesting that we'd found another instance of the fencepost.

I hadn't mailed him the picture by the time I learned, three days later, that he had died. I find this particularly poignant.

Once again I find myself not sure quite what the future holds - but I'm determined that our work to date needs to be built upon because what we were trying to do - Tim's vision - needs to be done by someone.

I'll miss the comprehensive streams of expletives in emails when things weren't going well, I'll miss the random links to weird and interesting things on the internet but most of all I'll miss my occasional lunches with a tall, gruff, slightly scruffy-looking bloke who could make me laugh like a drain at inappropriate comments and could make really shitty days better with the occasional hug.

Thanks, matey.

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