infoxicated

Back at the turn of the year I was told my role at work would be coming to an end, which came as no surprise as things had stagnated towards the end of the previous year. Fortunately, working for a sizeable company meant that the situation didn’t lead to redundancy – like it did when my department was axed in my previous job down in London.

Although nothing happened immediately, by June I’d been moved onto one of the development teams, where I set about re-learning programming skills I’d long since forgotten. The trouble with spending the last eight years as a web designer/developer, is that it was pretty far removed from the programming I’d done at college and university.

php is quite a high level language, when it boils down to it – you don’t really care about things like memory management, for example, because it’s all handled for you. It’s also not strongly typed – if I declare a variable and initialise it as an integer, I can change it to a string later on if the mood takes me. Not so with C or most other programming languages, for that matter – I’ve never quite understood why php was like that.

So, as you can imagine, six years spent as a php developer hasn’t exactly sharpened my programming skills with regard to C. It’s led to quite a bit of frustration over the summer, due to spending most of my time picking through compile errors caused by syntactical nuancies. It goes without saying that I was starting to doubt if I could hack it as a “real” programmer, even though I’ve wanted to be a games programmer since I was dabbling in Sinclair Basic at the age of eleven.

Recently things have been going better, though. The principle programmer on our team has offered to mentor me, and that’s been invaluable. I think I’ve moved forward more since our first session two weeks ago than I had in the six weeks previous.

I still have a long way to go, and I’m sure the steep learning curve wont even out for a while. I still welcome the odd scrap of web work that comes my way, because the feeling of confidence that comes with really knowing what I’m doing is a welcome relief.

A 560 mile round trip took us down to Sussex at the weekend, for the funeral of our friend Chris Guscott.

I have to admit that on the drive down I had a feeling of apprehension about the event. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to make the trip – far from it – it was purely dread of the inevitable wave of sorrow I knew I’d feel when I saw Rose, Jess, Anna, Becks, and Kate, plus a host of other family and friends of Chris that I had yet to meet.

As with most things that appear daunting, the reality was far less uncomfortable than I had imagined. Well, except for the part at the church – that just felt awful and surreal at the same time. As Fliss and I struggled to control Elisha, each and every person did the same with their emotions as the ceremony wore on.

Once outside for the commital it was even harder to hold back the tears. As Chris was lowered to his final resting place, in contrast to the mood, the sun chose that moment to stream powerfully through the clouds in a way that almost seemed inappropriate. But then, from what I’ve seen of him, Chris always had a good tan, so I think he would have approved.

Squinting through teary eyes in the sunlight, I watched as his beloved wife, daughters and son said goodbye, dropping their flowers into the grave in turn. It proved to be as harrowing a moment as I’ve experienced, yet somehow the strength of Rose, Simon, and the girls was more than enough to steady everyone gathered at the cemetery. Rose was even unfaltering when she asked, almost matter-of-factly, for those present to join them at the church hall for food and drink.

With that, the sombre part of the day was more or less over. Now we could gather together to recall memories of Chris (or in my case, learn more about him), drink some wine, and (best of all) listen to his eclectic taste in music for the rest of the afternoon.

Given the circumstances I think it turned out to be a lovely day – as well as paying my respects to a fine man, I got to meet many of the extended family for the first time. There were relatives from around the country, and from Australia and the USA, that were great to chat with, and Elisha proved to be very popular with Beck’s four year old son, Freddie. (Although it was hard work keeping up with the pair of them!)

I was completely knocked for six this afternoon when Fliss told me that our friend Chris Guscott had died while on holiday with his wife, Rose.

Chris was a wonderful man – eccentric and enthusiastic in equal measure, and with a sharp wit and intelligence that always made me want to listen when he spoke – even when it was in Portuguese.

His love for trains and railways was just one of the things that made him a great character. He’d come home from a hard day at work, grab his dinner, and plonk himself down on the sofa to eat it while he studiously thumbed through a magazine about trains. The rest of the family would mock him about that, but I quietly thought it was brilliant.

On the shelves of the spare room were a variety of scale models – all waiting for a track to run on, back when we visited in July, just like they had been when we visited two years previously. I know this because I’d examined each one closely during both visits, hoping one day to see them in a scene similar to those depicted in the train magazines littered around the house.

I guess some things you just never get round to doing.

Although I only met him twice, Chris welcomed us into his home with open arms when we visited, and I’m glad we got to introduce him to Elisha during the summer. I’m going to miss Chris dearly, and my sympathies go out to Rose and the family for their loss.

Adeus, my friend.