Loving to learn and George

George Cole taught me a lot about an inquisitve mind and love of the stuff that warms the shoals of your heart -- learning, good wine, rugby, cricket, and laughter on those cold mornings when you walk with your head bent down. I'll miss George. He had a warmth that rose from underneath his gregarious laugh. He loved the winter swims [but not the cold water] at Austinmer in the early morning. He always had a warm smile and strong handshake for me. "Going on your morning constitutional, Lachie?" He would ask on the mornings as I passed him coming back from the morning swim, his large yellow fins sticking up like humming bird wings.

George had a truly generous and loving family. Brownwyn taught my partner jenne to drive. Jenne didn't trust me. Bronwyn has a generous smile and phrase. She probably got a bit greyer teaching Jenne. I taught his son George Cole to play football.

George used to help with the school fetes and selling badges to early morning train goers. He would raise money for young teens with cancer.

Now we are missing a friend and a good, generous man, gone from his friends at Austinmer when he was looking forward to many things in his life. I didn't get a chance to see George before I got back from hong Kong.

We don't know the time or manner of our death.

When I'm back in Austinmer I'll have a quiet peaceful swim in the cold Austinmer rock pool. And then shiver up the street. I don't have humming bird fins.

I was thinking of Robert Frost. But this is from Seamus Heaney , an Irish poet. From 1966, when I was 10.

'Light came from the east,' he sang,

'Bright guarantee of God, and the waves went quiet.

I could see headlands and the buffeted cliffs.

Often, for marked courage, fate spares the man

It has not marked already.'

And when their objection was reported to him -

That he had gone to bits and was leaving them

Nothing to hold on to, his first and last lines

Neither here nore there -

'Since when,' he asked,

"Are the first and last lines of any poem

Where the poem begins and ends?'

George loved our language too. You could tell.

Above is the big Buddha from Lantau Island. You can get a warm, vegetarian meal there included in the cost of your visit. The Buddha weighs how many tonnes? George would find out and post the question on the blackboard at Austinmer beach.