Our lives are enriched by our friendships. Andrew Vickers, who passed away, aged 64, on 26th June, 2022, at his home in Stanton Hill, Nottinghamshire was a true friend and former colleague of mine. We met for the first time in August, 1988 when I took up my first teaching post at a school in Leicester.

Andrew was already an established teacher of Humanities and he was a wholly impressive figure: he had an intellectual rigour about him that, unusually for most of the teaching profession, was backed up by a genuine affinity for those whom he taught. The teenagers under his tutelage loved him for his  knowledge and his outspokeness, and for the laughter he brought into the classroom. In short: Andrew was a bright and maverick pedagogue, the sort of man who any of us would’ve loved to have had as our teacher.

Equally, he was a great story-teller, who easily captivated his listeners: at a party in the summer of 1999, he recounted a hilarious and graphic story of a lost weekend in Amsterdam with an acquaintance, Andy Priest. Yes, the Priest and Vicar went on a coffee-shop fuelled mission in the Netherlands. He began telling the tale at 2 a.m and only finished as the sun rose over the garden, 3 hours later.

Earlier, in the summer of 1995 I went on a 6 week holiday to California and loaned him my car. When I returned to the unusually sun-scorched fields of Britain, he told me he had had a wonderful time, beginning with him working as a steward at a festival in Cornwall, before heading elsewhere and clocking up some two and a half thousand miles in the process. He’d ditched his white shirt and tie and taken his t-shirt and donkey jacket to wear on the job.  I offer that anecdote in order to hint at this – Andrew was a social chameleon, a man at ease wherever he may be, a man who was able to connect with anyone.

His funeral took place at Mansfield crematorium, last Monday, 25th July, 2022. He leaves behind his beloved daughters, Annie and Lara and his 5 grandchildren.

Thus, I offer this poem in celebration of our friendship. It can only hint at the plethora of anecdotes I have of him – he was a man I am proud to call my friend and one who was always there throughout my trials and tribulations as a young teacher, the evictions of 2010 and 2011 and onwards.

 

 

In-between the Gaps

 

Your trademark chuckle echoes through our minds,

In truth, the only infection of these lost times.

When we played at political correctness, we knew the game

No one ever stopped you from calling a spade its name.

 

Back in the scorched summer of ninety-five,

I gave you my motor for a holiday drive

That became two and a half thousand miles.

 

‘Fook me, weren’t you only going south west?’

‘Aye, but the fancy took me north, then east; you know the rest.’

Our holographic lives, loop, curl and shake,

Intersecting, as overlapping ripples across a lake.

 

In Galway, a naive barman told us to vacate our chairs,

An American, tender of age, of our customs unaware;

Our pints were full and we could but scoff

Politely telling him to fook right off.

 

Later, in tangles of slippy kelp, we took seaweed baths

And to this day, I am reminded of how you laughed,

Sprinkling merriment, a northern comic,

Satirising the system and the idiotic.

 

And, when the teaching seemed crass,

You’d remind me to toke on the scorched grass,

Be ready for the gaps, when the pupil is clear and open

To see the truth, gently inserted in that moment.

 

You have left behind countless memories

Heaps of tales, hordes of precious times

That drop as jewels to ripple through our minds.

 

The aether glows around this chapel, as you soul-surf the air,

To this, I swear, hairs stand on end when I ask, ‘are you there?’

And now, you are here, in this pub on top of the Hill

And all that needs stating is, ‘I love thee still and always will.’

 

These moments bear witness to your stature,

Though a gap has manifested in your departure,

It is but temporary, for the ripples flow, left and right

Radiant, resilient, twinkling droplets of immortal light.

 

 

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Footnote: The cause of his death is, as I write, “unknown”, even after a toxicology report. Regular and/or attentive readers will draw their own conclusions when I state that Andrew had had the Three Dart Finish.