Dave and Sue

I used to disappear at lunchtime. Get on my bike, ten minutes up the hill, between Pleckgate and the edge of Blackburn. The bullies spent their lunchtimes looking for me. I was already somewhere else entirely.

Dave and Sue were young. Closer to the sixties than I was — closer to the war, actually, in the way that generations carry things. They had that generation's relationship with time. With sitting still. With actually talking. They made tea. They fed me. And they gave me something that I didn't have a name for then: their full and genuine attention.

I could be gone for months. Then I'd just appear — up the stairs, through the door. And it was always like I'd never been anywhere. No catching up required. No performance of continuity. Just: present. The kettle went on. The conversation picked up wherever it needed to go.

Sue was about five-foot-five and an absolute fireball. Sweet, warm, always there to listen when I was having a bad time. And when I'd had enough of my own spiralling, she'd say: get on with it. You'll be fine. Believe in the process. She meant it. It landed.

Dave was a musician. A drummer first — and good at it, properly good. But what he was really doing, what he was obsessed with, was recording the world. He had a TASCAM four-track recorder and he would record absolutely anything.

He'd get so excited when a thunderstorm came. Really excited — genuinely lit up by it. He'd go for the recorder. The thunder became material. The rain on the window became percussion. I still do things he did. I didn't realise that until recently.

He had me play harmonica for him. He had me beatbox — and I was beatboxing for him back then, before anyone called it that. He'd make tunes out of it on the spot, layering it over whatever he was building. The music was wild and wonderful: Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Frank Zappa. Hendrix. And then Kraftwerk — he loved electronic music, loved what it was doing, even though he was a drummer at heart. Prog rock and electronica living in the same flat, making sense together.

The flat itself: little hallway, turn right, down a short corridor into the living room. Left, off the corridor, a small galley kitchen. In the corner of the living room: the drum kit, the recording setup, the TASCAM. Along the left wall: a big sofa, a couple of chairs. A bookcase. Records. Esoteric trinkets — the kind of things a person accumulates when they're genuinely curious about the world, not decorating for guests.

It was in that flat that they told me about Prem Rawat — Guru Maharaji. Something happening in Brighton, 1991. They told me I should go. I was seventeen, doing hypnosis, very cynical about anything that smelled like a guru. I went anyway. And what he was teaching — I understand now — was exactly what I'm doing. The inner peace work, the practical side, the permission to just be. I didn't have the framework for it then. I do now.

They're gone now. They were older than my parents when I was young, so the maths was always going to go this way. But they don't feel gone. They're in the way I pick up a recorder when something interesting is happening. They're in the way I give strangers my full attention. They're in the way I make tea first, before anything else.

The thunderstorm is still worth recording. Dave knew that before anyone had a word for it.