One of my oldest friends passed away in August (2022), after a short spell in a hospice.
I first met Matt, and his brother Nick, on the bus into school when I moved from Yardley Court, in Tonbridge, to The Skinners' School in Tunbridge Wells.
In no time at all we were as thick as thieves and I very quickly came to regard both of them as brothers-from-another-mother, their parents' becoming my surrogate parents.
Their family, which included older brother Adrian, lived on the other side of our village (Pembury) from my parents' house, but it was an easy jaunt for me, either on foot or by bicycle, to get there.
There's too many hijinks and escapades to share here, but we went on holidays together, formed a band (The Bondage Girls), made movies (the slasher Bloody Hell and the gangster flick The Conscious-Free Brothers are the ones I remember, but, sadly no longer have the videos of), played games, went to parties, gigs, and football matches etc
Like brothers, we laughed together, supported each other, listened to each other, got drunk together, commiserated with each other, mocked and ridiculed each other, argued and fought, but ultimately loved each other.
Nine months younger than me, Matt was also a writer. He and I had short stories published next to each other in a collection of "new talent" from the South East of England, but, my copy of that has also, sadly, disappeared.
Matt, however, would go on to write several books under the pseudonym of Matty Brown, namely The Lonely Penguin Tours and The Art of Skimming Stones.
Together with his brothers, Matt would also form Chekov Plays Pop, a real guitar-pop band (unlike The Bondage Girls they played actual gigs and performed to audiences), that I reviewed several times for the paper I worked for, exhibiting no bias in my reviews whatsoever.
Career-wise, Matt started as an office drone at National Provident Institution (a big employer in Tunbridge Wells, where several of my friends worked, even though I never really understood what they did).
He had a daughter, Jessica, who now has a child of her own, making Matt the first of our peers to become a grandparent.
Eventually growing tired of office work, he retrained and returned to our neck of the woods to quickly carve out a successful career as a much-loved geography teacher.
He was an usher at my wedding to Rachel, but unfortunately after that our lives simply drifted apart.
Although we exchanged the occasional message on Facebook, I hadn't seen Matt in years.
Yet, I still can't fathom the idea of a world without him.
My thoughts are with his family and loved ones.
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