Sandbach’s answer to Eddie the Eagle on the ski jump the Tablers built for a friend’s birthday party. Predictably, it didn’t go well.
I wish that we could talk about it
But there, that's the problem.
‘Someone Great’, LCD Soundsystem
Just before Easter I heard the news that Paul Stubbs, one of my dad’s oldest friends, had died.
Since I found out - via text from my brother - I have been a bit all over the place emotionally; nudged by the soft hand of grief. I’ve not really been able to think about much else.
Why, I don’t truly know. Sorrow, yes, for Paul and for my dad at losing his friend; sympathy for his wife Elaine and children Lora and Daniel; anger at the injustice of his diagnosis, a few years ago, with the incurable cancer which he fought and seemed to beat but which came back, as it always does, in the end.
But probably there’s something else. Something about growing up and getting older. Something about his being the first - and least likely - of my parents’ closest friends to go. I say least likely, because he was always so full of life. Like Viv Savage, the incongruous keyboardist of mock-rock band Spinal Tap, it often seemed as if Paul’s sole mission in life was to have a good time all of the time. And, frankly, why the fuck not?
*
For those of you who didn’t know him, Paul Stubbs was many things. A vicar’s son, first; a rebellious adolescent, of course; thereafter a husband, father and grandfather. A committed Round Tabler and Chairman of his local branch. A sports fanatic: skiing, golf, football, snooker, rugby, crown green bowls, darts, cards - you name it, he did it. Petrolhead and BBQ connossieur, raconteur and propper-upper of many bars in Sandbach, our hometown. I was always slightly hazy about what he did for a living: selling stuff seemingly, before setting up an engineering business with his son.
In company, he was gregarious, affable and loud, with a laugh like Lenny Henry’s. A laconic bullshitter, wind-up merchant and all-round mentalist, Rob and Neil Gibbons, who also knew Paul well through Table, borrowed his name to create Paul Stubbs the washed up DJ and used car salesman described in I, Partridge, their ghostwritten psuedo-memoir for the scion of Norwich. As someone who put his body on the line time and time again for his friends’ entertainment, you sense that being immortalised through comedy is something of which Paul would wholeheartedly approve.
*
A month younger and an inch taller than my dad, Paul was like a bigger, younger brother; one with a broader physique and, unlike my dad, an untroubled head of hair. As virile young men in the early Eighties, both wore unfortunate moustaches. When I was very young, my parents were close friends with the Stubbses; close enough for me to prefix their names with Aunt and Uncle for a while, and for Paul to make my dad godfather to Daniel. For a number of years we lived just around the corner from them. In fact they lived with us for a few months while they were renovating their home, though I have no memory of this.
My parents met Paul and Elaine through the Sandbach branch of Round Table, the fellowship organisation for upwardly-mobile young men with a penchant for ill-advised facial hair. Table was accompanied by a sister organisation for wives and partners called - brace yourselves! - Ladies Circle, which mum and Elaine joined. Tablers typically met once a fortnight at a local venue, usually The Wheatsheaf in town or at the long-since-demolished Saxon Cross Motel, where my parents had had their wedding reception.
Round Table made a big noise in Sandbach in those days. Some Tablers - like my dad - were the upstart offspring of the town’s Rotarian establishment. But they had their own way of doing things; raising money for charitable causes through whimsical or hair-raising enterprises, like freshwater raft-races in less-than-seaworthy craft, or cycling from Sandbach to Holland, or completing the Three Peaks Challenge in 48 hours.
On May Day, the Tablers and Circlers would roast a huge ox on the cobbled square next to the town’s ancient Saxon Crosses; dress up in Elizabethan outfits, put the Chairs of their respective organisations in a set of medieval stocks and invite people to throw wet sponges at them. Come Christmas, they brought Santa to the children of the town with the annual float, a shonky trailer decked out in painted plywood and fairy lights; the Santa some luckless, freezing Tabler in a nylon outfit and scratchy false beard.
There were also exchange visits with continental Tabling cousins and their families in Pontoise and Schwerin, where the Sandbachians would improve their language skills, sample the local culture and customs, and then get completely rat-arsed thanks to their hosts’ hospitality.
The fraternal and charitable purposes of Table were underscored, reinforced and at times liberally doused in alcohol. Booze and the enjoyment thereof colours many of my memories from that time; memories which often involve blokes standing around a barbecue or large fire drinking beer, then doing or saying irresponsible things while their wives looked on aghast.
Paul was frequently instigator-in-chief, and he could always be relied upon to do something a bit reckless. Banger racing with a sluggish, knackered estate car? Tick. Coating every piece of meat on the barbecue - including the children’s food - in tandoori sauce? Tick. Building a lethal-looking ski jump (with my dad’s assistance) in a friend’s back garden out of wooden planks, a plasterer’s scaffold and some rope? Tick.
Alcohol was prevalent in their social milieu, though not exclusively. As their cycling and Three Peaks endeavours proved, the Tablers could still have a good time without it. But their child-free gatherings, like the pre-Christmas Chairman’s Cocktail Party, were always raucous, and frequently resulted in some small-scale scandal.
Then, later, came the bittersweet 40th birthday parties as one by one my parents and their friends came of age and stepped out of Table and into 41 Club. The waistlines expanded, the hair thinned and the crow’s feet lengthened, but for a long time things stayed largely the same.
*
As a child, we frequently holidayed with Paul and Elaine and the kids. Skiing, golfing, camping; usually on a tight budget.
As the first of the Sandbach Tablers to catch the ski bug in the early 80s, there is a photograph of Paul and Elaine with my parents on the Round Table ski weekend in Glenshee, the sole representatives of Sandbach 201. It’s also notable for being one of the few photographs of my mother smiling while skiing. After this initial path-finding mission, the Round Table skiing weekend in Scotland became a regular fixture in our lives, swiftly followed by weeks in the Alps with a large Table contingent. Multi-family ski trips where we all crammed into one self-catering apartment to drink mulled wine. Parents sozzled, kids bored.
The differences between dad and Paul are evident in their approach to skiing. Dad was fairly sensible; Paul was a complete lunatic, launching himself off jumps, or down black runs with fearsome names like the Tiger and the Wall, with little regard for safety or technique. He liked to be out there, on the edge. I wouldn’t like to speculate on the profits of a religious upbringing, but sometimes you had to wonder if he simply wanted to be closer to God.
I always remember him skiing aggressively, and it was exhilarating to ski alongside him. Though not too close. There were the inevitable wipeouts and broken bones: like the time he broke his leg on the last run of the day at Glenshee; the time he upended himself on a patch of exposed mud and earned himself the soubriquet Muddy Stubby; or the time he crashed when landing a massive jump in Courchevel and broke the handle of his ski pole (the crash was caught on video but strangely never made it onto You’ve Been Framed).
*
Then there was golf. In Paul, my dad found a steadfast playing partner. When I was six or seven we all stayed at a villa in Portugal for the October holidays, a trip where we achieved the remarkable feat of squeezing seven people into a Renault 5. Dad and Paul mostly played golf while we mostly splashed around in the pool, it being too hot to do much else. Also, the men had taken the car with them. Though when we went to a waterpark that week, it was Paul who took me up on the waterslides, convinced me to go down the terrifying-looking chute which ended with a six foot drop into a plunge pool. Showed me how to dive into the villa pool.
This was the week of the booze-induced skinny dipping incident, and it was also the week that Paul bought a squid at a market and declared he was going to barbecue it - once he’d worked out how to prep it. To kill the squid, Paul told me, the fishmonger had had to whack it over the head with a baseball bat. That fucking squid sat in the fridge for the whole week, palely malevolent in its plastic bag; I half expected it to come back to life and crawl out, slip into the pool, or - worse - strangle me in my bed. Finally he threw it away, and we had sardines instead.
*
Other trips. Camping weekends at James’ farm, a soggy field somewhere in north Wales with a single standpipe. The adults dressed as Robin Hood and his band of merry men (Paul as Friar Tuck with bald skullcap). Rain-sodden Table weekends in the Lakes and Peaks, sunnier jaunts in Wrexham and Anglesey. The annual Round Table banger racing weekend, where the Sandbachians competed noisily against other branches, and quietly against one other. So many rounds of golf and innings of campsite cricket. Crumpled copies of the Sunday Sport and half-drunk cans of John Smiths. The dry, musty insides of a Cafe Creme tin left out in the rain. The hilariously retro trailer tents which are almost - but not quite - back in fashion. Barbecues and campfires, nights sat out on folding chairs under the stars; each year growing slowly more attuned to adult conversation. An endless summer of sorts.
Sandbach 201 with the four-man bike they had built for the charity ride to Holland. Another health and safety nightmare. Paul centre of the picture on the bike (as per). My dad second from right on the back row.
Coming into an adult world.
The first time I heard an adult say ‘fuck’ was in the back of my dad’s car, driving back from skiing at the Cairngorm’s area to Blairgowrie, where we were staying. (Or was it Ballater?) I would have been nine or ten. Heavy rain had flooded parts of Aberdeenshire, and when my dad drove his car into a large puddle and stalled the engine, Paul remarked: You went in like a fucking crane! (Or was is, train? Perhaps, even, plane?) The two of them went quiet for a moment. Seemed to acknowledge my presence. Then my dad restarted the car and we drove away like nothing happened.
*
Another time driving somewhere, summertime, dad at the wheel, Paul in the passenger seat. Two boy racers overtook us. On the next straight, dad overtook them. Paul wound down his window and shouted, Easy! as we passed.
*
A photograph from New Years Eve at my parents house. 1992 or 1993. Me in my favoured orange Joe Bloggs jumper. Smoothed skinned, before the acne kicked in. Paul playing beside me, in his fancy dress outfit of shorts and t-shirt (the highly original NYE theme was beach party). Playing a computer game - at his instigation - on the Commodore Amiga I shared with my brother. Can’t remember what we were playing. But there it is.
*
Then adolescence and university and the desire to get away and do new things. Paul’s presence diminished as I grew tired of Table and saw less of my parent’s friends, but when my dad came to visit when I was working in a ski hotel in France, Paul came with him. It was a cut-price trip and they were given the worst room. Shortly after arriving, at dinner, Paul announced to everyone he had found a flea on the bed. I said there were no fleas in the hotel. Flies, perhaps, but not fleas. He was adamant he’d seen a flea. It jumped! I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
We drank a lot that week. Wine at dinner, shots in the bar. Beers on the slopes. I was glad my dad came and doubly glad he brought Paul. That, I think, was the last time we skied together. Twenty years ago.
Twenty years.
*
When do your parents’ friends change from being exclusively their friends to being yours too?
Is it at the moment they stop speaking to you as a child and treat you as an adult? Swear in front of you without apologising? Tell you a dirty joke? Buy you a beer? Let you into their confidence?
Is it at the point when you come to understand that the interests you hold are the same as theirs not through some process of youthful osmosis but from some happy coincidence, some realisation of common experience?
Or is it just the reassurance of them being there, when you return to the place of your birth after a long spell away, unchanged, steadfast, ever-present, with a wide smile, twinkling eye and some new story to tell. Being pleased to see you. And knowing that this distinction between child and adult no longer matters. And you remember. The comfort of that which is familiar. Reassuring. Friendly. And the difference in years falls away.
*
Something about growing up and getting older.
*
Because I liked the things my dad liked, like golf and skiing - and got reasonably proficient at them - I spent a fair bit of time in the company of his friends. But I wasn’t unusual in that. Round Table fostered this sense of community. Everyone looked out for one another, showed interest in the endeavours of their friends’ kids - though as a kid I was a bastard at times to Paul’s son, Daniel; a source of much regret - and while Table wasn’t terribly diverse and sometimes pretty un-PC, and more than a bit chauvinistic, it reflected the time and place we lived in. And now we live fragmented, virtualised lives - globally diasphoric, distanced and reconnected by technology - its easy to lose contact, to fall out of touch. If you want to know what someone is up to, you don’t pick up the phone, you just look them up on Facebook. Paul, like my dad, resisted that. His profile consisted of his date of birth and a picture of a motorbike. If you wanted to know what he was up to, you had to see him.
*
The last time I saw Paul was in the Beer Emporium in my parent’s hometown. A craft ale shop with beer on tap and a small room at the back for bearded middle-aged men to commune. That night I had arranged to meet someone – another Tabler friend of my dad’s who had become my own – and not long after we arrived, a group of unfamiliar men came in. Paul was with them. It transpired that he had joined a male choir, and had just been at rehearsals. This was so unlikely it was almost obtuse. The last thing I would have pictured him doing. Possibly the last thing his thrill-seeking younger self would have done. Nevertheless. He was doing it. Trying knew things. In Albania he’d been having trouble with one of his knees, which meant that thrill-seeking was becoming increasingly problematic. A consequence of getting on in years. I asked him how it was, the knee, and he said, Better. We had a couple of beers, a few laughs, then went our separate ways.
About a year later, maybe two, I was - again - in the car with my dad. We were going somewhere, I forget where. He might have been visiting me in Scotland. Dad said he was expecting a call, from Paul, who’d been due to see the doctor; he said it was something serious. Paul called, but when he heard I was in the car, rang off. I knew then that things weren’t good. And the whole time Paul was undergoing treatment for cancer, I never saw him. But I often asked my dad how he was doing. When he got better there had been talk of a party to celebrate. I’d planned to be there. Then Covid happened and we went into lockdown. And the rest is the rest.
*
Final things. Several months prior to bumping into Paul at the Beer Emporium my brother had married his Albanian fiancee in Tirana. My dad asked several of his closest friends to come out for the wedding. A kind of security blanket hewn from our nearest and dearest; mum was in remission then but wasn’t her old self, and the wedding was a source of stress for my dad and brother. Paul and Elaine jumped at the chance to go, travelling out a week in advance of everyone else to explore the country. Staying near Durrës, Paul texted my dad pictures from their trip, detailing his fascination with the small concrete bunkers Communist leader Enver Hoxha had built to protect the isolated, paranoid little Albanian state from its invisible enemies.
On our first night in Tirana - after a terrifying breakneck taxi journey from the airport - my wife and I joined the wedding party at a decidedly non-Communist bar, where Paul and Elaine recounted the highlights of their trip. Incredible food. Beautiful scenery. Lovely people. Dead sheep in the middle of the road. Bunkers all over the place.
We’re going on a bunker tour tomorrow, Paul said, you should come.
Oh yeah, what time?
We’re leaving at 8am.
Yeah, why not? We were humouring him. No way in the world would we make 8am. We proceeded to get very drunk and retired late.
At 7.30am the next morning we were woken, still drunk, by a fierce hammering on the door. I lurched out of bed to answer. It was Mr Stubbs.
Are you ready?
Ready for what?
The bunker tour!
Oh, that. We’re not coming, mate, we’re wrecked!
Come on! We’re leaving in 30 minutes! Come on - let’s go! See you at reception!
So my wife and I showered, forced down a coffee and croissant at the breakfast buffet, and went with Paul and Elaine - both of us feeling ropey as fuck in the back of the minibus for the first hour or so - and we had one of the best days, possibly one of the most memorable days we’ve ever had on holiday.
The tour, organised by Albanian Trip, took us out into the countryside near Tirana, taking in Orthodox churches, cheese and wine at a farmer’s house, pink pomegranates fresh from the tree, a trip to an abandoned beach resort, a Michelin-star quality lunch at Mrizi Zanave for next-to-nothing - and hundreds, hundreds, of Hoxha’s bunkers. I took my camera with me and got so many photographs. We were literally out from sunrise to sunset. And if Paul hadn’t blagged us, if he had taken no for an answer, if we’d stayed in bed and hung around the pool all day, we’d have missed it. We’d have missed Albania.
But it wasn’t just that. It was so nice to spend time in the company of Paul and Elaine again. To be reminded of how they were as a couple. Just like old times.
*
When my wife and I got married, I didn’t invite Paul and Elaine down to London for it. I should have made sure they got an invite. I didn’t. We had limited space at the pub we’d chosen for the party and I said to my parents that they would have to choose who could come. I said three couples max. So they chose. I’ll always regret that.
*
Friendship. Ebb and flow.
When I was younger Paul and my dad were really close.
Then - for whatever reason - they weren’t so close for a while.
But they became close again. When it mattered most.
Ebb and flow. Time and tide.
*
My brother married his wife at a hotel in the hills overlooking Tirana later that week. After the wedding ceremony we sat down to the wedding banquet - a meal of many course which the British contingent dutifully chomped their way through at great pace - causing great consternation to the caterers, who couldn’t get the food out fast enough - while the Albanian guests sang and danced to traditional Albanian songs (and Taylor Swift). It wasn’t long before the Brits joined them. It was completely madcap.
And of course, Paul was - as ever - in the thick of it, necking homemade raki - the Albanian drink Romesh Ranganathan described as petrol on his visit - and ingratiating himself with my brother’s new in-laws. After a while, Elaine had to take him outside. To get some air. I also drank too much that night - to wash down the meat - and also had to go outside with my wife to get some air. We sat outside, looking at Tirana twinkling in the valley below. Paul and Elaine were talking very quietly. We weren’t sure if Paul was in hot water, so we left them to it, but while outside Helen overheard Paul explaining to his wife that he could see the future. And its beautiful.
Paul and I spent much of the next day in bed nursing our hangovers. Evidently not the beautiful future he had foreseen. Eventually he resurfaced and went for a restorative kebab with my brother and his new wife and their friends. I wish - very much - that I’d gone with him.
*
But I still don’t believe that he saw that flea.
Paul Stubbs. The Man, The Myth, The Legend. 1955-2021.
Before the screaming started. Glenshee, Scotland. 1983 or ‘84. The pioneering contingent from Sandbach 201 at the annual Round Table Ski Weekend. Note the lack of adequate ski apparel: Paul - ever the optimist - appears to be wearing chinos and legwarmers. This must have been taken before they even took to the slopes as they all look far too happy.