Max

Two years ago Seamus had a birthday meal at the Paradise by Way of Kensal Green and invited my wife Deborah and myself to dine with the family. Max sat across the table from me. I'd known him since he was in nappies. I saw him grow up into a rowdy buzzbomb six year old, a ravenous early teen, a slouching sixth former. At the Paradise I was struck by how charming he'd become. He'd probably always had this charisma but it had usually been eclipsed by the fridge door which so frequently blocked him from view within moments of his entering the O'Connell kitchen. Max had an extraordinary physicality. He was fluid, languid, laidback, incisive, vague, radiant and jolly and all these were signalled through his body. If he never sat up straight it was because he was somehow never still and because he was never still his back, I imagine, stayed in constant elastic tone. Back in the sixties, when Seamus and I were beatniks, people would pay good money for serpentine posture like that. It was considered to epitomise cool. You could spot people trying too hard a mile off.

I counted one hundred and sixty six people at the football match last Sunday. There were four teams, including one comprising Max's mates from Newcastle, plus countless frozen friends, some weeping, some cheering, some shaking their heads. The guys hurtled around the pitch and then, from time to time, in small knots, came to embrace Seamus, Victoria and Rachel. They were gentlemanly butunabashed. In the course of the afternoon it became clear that Max had been the bright centre of communities ranged across at least three cities. Seamus said that the assembled crowd was probably only a fraction of the people whose lives had been touched by his affable son.

Sometimes Max seemed out of it and sometimes he seemed wise, as if amiably chiding us for being overly attentive to aspects of the world that really didn't deserve it.

There's no idea that can hold Max's death, no philosophical position that will explain it or soften it. It has no meaning, it is not sent to show us anything. This sunny, sociable, handsome man has left and we are not wiser, we are very, very sad.

David