Day 271. Man dreams, spirit lives. (28/9/13)

And writing about The Waterboys made me think of a lad that I used to work with.

Mark Smith worked with me when I first arrived in Leeds. I'm almost entirely certain that his middle initial was 'E' so that he was, in full, Mark E.Smith just like the lead singer of The Fall. Mark's greatest claim to fame was that he had once smoked weed with his namesake.

His link to The Waterboys? He told me once that every Waterboys album had at least one song that could break your heart. We were talking specifically about 'A Man is in Love' from the 'Room To Roam' album but he was right, there is one heartbreaker on every release that the band put out and I think of  Mark every time I discover the most recent.

Mark was old school, loved his job, loved music, had a massive knowledge and was totally dedicated to his work. And there's no easy way to put this but from the first day that I knew Mark, I knew that Mark was dying.

He had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour before I arrived at that store and, while many people would have either given up and accepted their fate or sacked everything off and taken one last round the world trip as a final gift to themselves, Mark was determined that he would live his life in exactly the same way that he always had, take the treatment that was offered and make damn sure that his beat his condition.

To an extent this was working, he had already lived longer than his prognosis by the time that I met him. He used to take a medicine that was based around mistletoe juice, the idea being that mistletoe clings to the trunks of trees, wraps itself around the tree and constricts it so the liquid would work in the same way on the tumour. There must have been something in this as it clearly wasn't growing.

The only physical evidence of Mark's condition was that he would take fits. They would occur out of the blue and obviously, at times, these happened in working hours. The first time that somebody 'fits' in front of you is a shock. You freeze, feel useless. The more it happens, the more you get used to it. You deal with it. You just make sure that the person that it's happening to is okay, particularly when it's somebody so innately likeable.

People would stand and watch. There's not a lot you can say about that, you can't even really apportion any blame to them, it's a human nature thing, people don't mean anything by it, they can't help themselves. Doesn't make it any more pleasant though.

And Mark bore all this with good grace. No sense of self pity, no 'why me?', his attitude was more 'why not me?' - it could have happened to anybody, it was what it was.

One day it came to the point that he had to be retired through ill health, it was no longer feasible for him to work. If I remember correctly he moved in with his wife's parents so that there was always somebody on hand to look after him if he was taken unwell.

I moved from Leeds soon after that. It's terrible but I have no idea what happened to Mark. I hope that there was some kind of miracle, that he's still out there somewhere, living the happy life that would be deserved by such a genuinely pleasant, nice, good person.

For five minutes of every Waterboys album though, he's there.