My first real friend was Godfrey

And for the first few weeks of our friendship

I always thought

Who calls their kid Godfrey?

Then I met his Mum

And I thought

He got away lightly

Together we shared our first experience of alcohol

I was thirteen at the time

So a late starter where I grew up

We stole a bottle of sherry from his Dads booze cupboard

Snuck round the back of the park

And drank the whole thing

We spent the rest of the night punching each other

And making promises fuelled by Bristol cream and childhood blindness

How we would never find girls

Debt

Religion

All the crippling cataracts of the later years

I remember the feeling

That night

Like the safety net of adolescence had been whipped from underneath us

Revealing something beautiful and terrifying

A few years later the special sickness got hold of Godfrey

They found him hanging in his garage

A bottle of sherry half empty by his feet