A very funny, very interesting, very nice man

We drifted down the pub, late-ish, as is our wont, knowing that on a Sunday evening there wouldn’t be many folk in, but also knowing that even if there weren’t any chums present, we would have a pleasant hour and a decent couple of pints.

In case you don’t know, the pub is the Dolphin, the village is Uphill, and in many ways it’s our second home. I mean that in the way that it’s comfortable, familiar, and we always have an interesting time there. We’re used to coming in and heading through to what we call the cross benches – it’s a parliamentary term meaning an area between the party in power and the opposition party. Obviously in the pub we only mean it in a frivolous way as the middle bar between the two end bars.

Our friend Pat was sitting there, enjoying his customary glass of white wine and we joined him. Our thoughts and conversations turned to T. He was one of what we privately called the three T’s – Trevor, Tim and Terry. Terry would always be perched on a stool at the end of the middle bar, and we would nearly always join him there . We’ve known Terry a very long time, and he and husband Bari were founder members of the pub band, Celtic Shambles. They were dubbed with this name by another regular, JC, who said Celtic was their genre and Shambles was the way they played it. 

Terry was a most interesting fellow, a very nice man, a very funny man and we were always pleased to be in conversation with him. He came from the north-east and had had a varied and interesting life, and this evening we exchanged stories with Pat about our memories of him and various stories of what he’d got up to.He had been a great sailor – Pat too was a sailor and had been in the Weston Bay Yacht Club, based in Uphill. In fact, my first memory of Terry was meeting him  at Anchor Head – he was wearing a nautical cap and was extremely cheery. At that point I didn’t go to the pub as regularly as the children were young, but my husband knew him from the Dolphin.

Once the children left home, I went to the Dolphin more frequently, late on for a last beer, and Terry was usually there and regaled us with stories of his varied life. When we first knew him he was always accompanied by his dog, Penny, known as Mrs Pen. Terry had been on a work trip to Gloucester, parked his vehicle and noticed a dog tied to a lamp post. When he came back three hours later, the poor dog was still there – being Terry, he untied it, left a note attached to the lamp post and took the dog home. She was Mrs Pen, a legend.

Terry was a great raconteur, and we loved hearing his stories, of his life in Newcastle and the north-east, his various interesting and different jobs which included a placement during the Falklands conflict, the bands he’d been in, sailing exploits, his various adventures in so many different parts of the world, his ordinary day to day experiences – a very funny, very interesting, very nice man.

We said goodnight to Pat, and we said we’d see him at the end of the week when we will say a last good-bye to Terry.

My featured image is of Celtic Shambles, Mick, Terry, Bari and Amy.