My Mate Chris (A character study)

This is a story of woe and misery, of dark magics and evil things best left buried in the foul places they dwell.

Not really, it’s about my mate, Chris, the “bruv” part of this blog.

My mate, Chris, is unlike anyone else you will ever meet. This doesn’t mean he is exceptionally tall or handsome or weird (well, maybe a bit weird), it means he is truly his own man and always has been. There may have been a time when he was someone else’s man, but we won’t go into that here. My mate Chris is a unique bugger and make no mistake. And it’s all his fault. All of it. My father once said, “you’ve never been the same since you met that bloody Christopher Hurn!”.

It is true that I have changed since I met him, but since I met him when I was five years old, it is probably for the best.

I met Chris on the playground at Highfield Primary School in Southampton, UK., a Church of England school that was actually attached to the church. We went to services every Wednesday morning throughout my primary, elementary and middle school years where we learned about God and religious things. So perhaps, noting that it was my mate Chris who introduced me to atheism in this environment, you might start to see how my dad’s words could seem to have some value?

Me and my mate Chris have been like two very similar things in a pod since the days we met and played together in that old playground. We played tons of games from the ridiculous “realistic positions” to the terrifying reenactments of Watership Down, to the ever popular imaginings of running away.

Running away was a popular theme for our fantasies. Strangely, our running away games tended to involve me being 13 years old, changing my name to Steve and getting a Land Rover. As we got older and started enjoying certain herbal remedies, our running away fantasies tended to involve motorcycles and foreign lands (do you see where I am going with this?).

Now, I said earlier that my mate Chris is a unique bugger and I may have implied that he is a bit weird. Let me elaborate with some bullet points here:

• He ran off and joined the circus (I shit you, not).
• He crashed a taxi into a bank.
• An actual bank mind you, not a bank.
• He went to France on the back of a dead cow.
• He dresses in camo and stalks squirrels at night.
• He can dance brilliantly, unencumbered by beat or rythm.
• His old dog was named Richard, because it was a bitch (and so was his boss, Richard).
• He once threw his glasses in a lake to retrieve a toy boat.
• He is afraid of sharks, bears and rabbits.
• He studied archeology.
• He always has a new toy and should never be allowed near a sickle or an axe.
• He crashed a BMW 328i, but he definitely was not drunk.
• He whittles things.
• He nearly cut off my ear with a sickle (or was it an axe, maybe both?).
• He invented the highly effective, but not sustainable, “Billy Whizz” diet.
• Nobody knows if he is married or not (even his wife).
• He knows a lot about things.
• He broke his arm hitting his sister over the head with his cast.
• He has never, to my knowledge, owned a cat named Johnson.
• He has absolutely no memory of his twenties.
• He has read every book ever written and some that have not.
• This list is getting silly.

Anyway, me and him are going to ride motorbikes together for about 6,000 miles and there is nobody I would rather do it with. I can not wait for the fascinating conversations by the fire, the silly jokes and me reminiscing about old stories about us that I just made up. And I dont have to worry about him being too weird because I will have him sealed up inside his bike helmet for most of the day and some of the night if necessary.