Ian Calvert – Goodbye to an old friend

Two weeks ago today, literally hours after Riza had been swapping messages with our good friend Ian Calvert, we learned of his tragic death in a car accident. Among that confusing mix of emotions that comes with the sudden passing of someone you’ve known and loved for a long time, I sat down to write the following tribute.

I first met Ian, like so many of my friends, in the first few days of my time at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. It was September 1979, and we were both living at Brinsford Lodge, which was a series of depressing post-war prefabricated buildings between Wolverhampton and Cannock that offered full board accommodation. Appropriately, our first meeting was at a fresher’s event which offered cheap beer, and lots of it. I remember seeing this tall skinny kid wearing a camouflage jacket, and I went over to chat. He was another self-confessed computer geek, and after exchanging the secret handshake (I know it’s hard to believe, but it hasn’t always been cool to be a geek), we started chatting. After a few minutes a couple of girls joined us, and for a moment, I thought it was our lucky night. I was doing my best to be charming and witty, and not to be outdone, Ian started to tell a joke. As the girls moved in closer, I suddenly realized that I knew the joke and that things were not going to end well (thankfully, I’ve long forgotten the joke, but I remember that the punch line had something to do with tampons). I couldn’t really kick him to stop, although I did consider spilling my beer on him. He delivered the punch line with that cheeky chappy, sniggery grin of his, and seemed genuinely confused when the two girls shared a look of disgust and edged away from us. I think that even back then, I started to realize just what a unique individual Ian was.

It’s funny how for so many people, the friends that you make in college days go on to be the best friends of your life. It’s certainly proved to be that way for me. When I look back to my first year at college, many of the friendships were centered around which block you lived in, or which course you were on. While I loved the people at Brinsford, I didn’t really take to the place itself or to it being so far away from the heady big city lights of Wolverhampton, and so I moved out after the first term. I then ended up getting glandular fever (mono) and having to give up the rest of my first year, and so I didn’t really reconnect with Ian and the gang until the following year. I was then living within walking distance of the main campus, but I used spend a lot of nights back at Brinsford. I also used to see a lot of Ian in the coffee bar, and in the various computer labs. I think that he might well have been the person who introduced me to the text-based computer game Adventure, that almost brought the computer network to its knees.

In our third year, I really saw a lot of Ian and the gang (Stephen, Bobby, Paul, Graham – and Chris, when he was in town) when they all moved into a house together not too far from where I was living. I remember Ian’s room in particular, as it was so full of computer stuff and the laser project he was working on. Besides computers, we both shared a love of music and good deals. There was a record shop near where you caught the bus to Dudley, and I made some great discoveries there. When Ian came round, he’d always want to hear the latest music that I’d found, and then he’d go out and get a copy.

After college, in those pre-Facebook days when it was harder to stay in touch, Ian and Chris were two of the friends that we did manage to stay in touch with. They came to stay with us for parties at our first house in Oldham, and we stayed with them at Chris’ parent’s place in Lytham. Ian was the first of us to move to the US, and I remember those long ‘letters from America’ that would arrive every couple of months. They’d run to about 10 or 12 pages of dot matrix print – the first page would be personalized for each friend and then the rest would be photocopies. That would leave all of us wondering who at least half of these people were. As others have mentioned, I don’t think that I’ve ever known anyone who made friends as readily as Ian.

I did lose track of Ian for about 5 years or so, but occasionally we’d get an update via others. In 1993, I started to go to the US on business, and on my first trip, I decided to call Directory Enquiries to see if I could track him down. That wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds, as though I’d heard that Ian had changed his surname, I wasn’t 100% certain that I had it right. Luckily the operator was very patient, and after 20 minutes or so, I had a Dallas telephone number for him. Imagine my surprise, when I called the number and Chris answered. He just happened to be over on a visit, and so I got to catch up with both of them. A couple of months later, I was back in the US on business, and I had to go to Texas for a meeting, so I decided to spend the weekend with Ian first. He picked me up from the airport, and we drove back to his place, where the plan was for me to grab a quick bite to eat and freshen up, and then we were heading out for the night. For those of you who remember what Ian’s fridge used to be like before Ann Marie brought some much needed order into his life, my options for a quick bite was some cheese that was well past its sell by date, some scary half-eaten, open cans of stuff or a can of Boddington’s, which he was very proud that he could now get in Dallas.

A lot of my memories about Ian seem to revolve around getting ready to go out. I remember the few days many of us shared down at the beach in Delaware, when we came together for Pam and Stephen’s wedding. If it wasn’t us trying to explain to Ian that his ‘bat belt’ (complete with all of his gadgets hanging off it) wasn’t really a fashion statement, we’d be losing the argument that less is more when it comes to splashing on expensive cologne or explaining that while we agreed that Wallace and Grommit was very funny, a t-shirt with the aforementioned characters wasn’t really an appropriate clothing choice for a night on the town.

Looking back over the almost 35 years I’ve known Ian (I’m not ready for past tense yet, because it still feels like he’s here with us), no other friend has ever managed that balance of making me laugh and exasperating me like he has. You could have the silliest conversations with Ian and the darkest, deepest conversations with him, often in the same night. I always enjoyed those late night talks that would stretch into the wee hours, where we’d relive the old days or dig deep into some obscure book that one or other of us had read.

Over the last few years, I’ve enjoyed that Facebook meant that you’d get those quirky one-liners from Ian, often responding to something you’d posted. I also liked that you got to share in his joy of discovery – something that never grew old or jaded with him. As I’m sure many of us did, I also got my fair share of those late night calls / texts (both of them usually complaining that I never picked up my phone). When Ian got the urge to share something with you, he tended to act on it straight away.

I’m going to miss those calls. I’m going to miss that sweet, funny, charming, lovable, infuriating man that I was lucky to call a friend for all of these years.