Life and Soul

Happy Birthday

Today Jamie would have been 42.

Consequently, although he remains rarely distant from my thoughts most days, today I have allowed myself to think much more.
Whist I was thinking a picture came into my head; Jamie has since been joined in heaven/the afterlife/the next dimensional universe that makes up whatever comes next [delete to taste] by our father, John – but most of you may have never known that tragically, our little brother was lost at full term, stillborn. His name was Jacob. So when I think of my lost brother and father I now think of three.

In this place that came into my daydreams today, I can see a white painted iron garden set:a perfect round table and high backed chairs with a weaved pattern twisting the metal so it looks almost soft.
Strangely (perhaps in strange and magical mixture that happens in dreams, of houses from my brother and I’s childhood) there garden set sits on a green lawn at what seems the very end of a walled garden. Some tall iron gates, with large holes created by their pattern, allow you to see through to a long white beach beyond with very, very blue water. The almost white sun is in the process of hitting the water, creating a perspective-perfect path of light over the waves . Its over-brightness is like something Dali might gave imagined – hyper real colours and overtly smooth perfections.

On the garden table is a old chess set, a slightly overflowing ash tray (obviously) and some glasses green liquid – possibly Absinthe.
Jamie liked the connotations but I don’t remember if he liked the drink itself. It might just be my strange visual-based brain giving me another vibrant colour to this dream-scape.

In one chair, his back to the gate, my father sits, well lolls, magically transformed back to his thirties with only a slight rise of a beer belly under his polo shirt. His arms are tanned and crossed and he is obviously deeply asleep, a white panama hat, placed completely over his face. I am betting the half burned-out cigarette in the ashtray is his, although one of the two young men sitting to his right and left soon pick it up with a ‘waste-not-want-not’ attitude.

Jamie is in the chair facing me (in a way that is both painful and wonderful to my dreaming heart) is slightly plump in the face, his messy, sun-kissed hair would make Harry Potter’s look tidy. Perhaps they had been swimming earlier, the way the salt used to turn his hair to straw in the summer as children? The sun is highlighting his features. He has a half smile of a man who know he is going to win.
If the man opposite is my younger brother, Jamie will certainly win.
Because James will have cheated outrageously.
Take it from the younger sister.

James wears a short-sleeved, slight loved-worn shirt worn almost as a jacket over the T-shirt below. The hand not clutching some kind of smoke or other, is playing absently with what looks like a mobile phone. (They must have these, wherever he is, or he would have had his -“this isn’t good enough” face on within 30 seconds of arriving) His eyes twinkle, echoing the sea beyond but brighter. There is no sound in my dream but he appears to be slightly nodding his head. He likes the music. He probably chose it.

I am unable to see the man sitting with his back to me but I expect is the brother I never knew, though I am guessing. Some clues are the that back of his auburn-tinged is distracted by a mad ‘cows-lick’ parting. He has long body that suggest he is much taller than her really is, as Jamie did. His head also seems to be moving. Is he singing? Talking? I wish this dream was at night  and not during the afternoon so I can turn the sound to 5:1 surround.

Its just a picture, but it helps.
When I see things like that it feels again like Jamie is just away in another country, having a well-earned break after a gig, gathering his thoughts before he moves on to his next project.
In that daydream I can forget for a while that flights back are cancelled and the price to visit is one I can’t afford to pay – not yet.

If you have a memory or a daydream like mine, please on what was his birthday, the start of my family and the celebration of the first child, take a few minutes off and stay there for a while.
Raise a glass. Blow smoke rings to the heaven whether under a wet September sky or a bright Thai sunbeam.
We miss you James – John – Jacob.
Happy Birthday, big brother.

One Year One…

One year has now passed since James left us. Those you that don’t know will have mixed feelings on learning that his dad, John, joined Jamie this year after dying suddenly in January. Those that loved them try and dream about them on the “white shores” of the other side…although they are certain to be causing trouble. Rumor has it that not all the recent ash in the clouds is down to the Icelandic volcano but simply Jamie & his dad throwing a party after finding some particularly flourishing plants in Eden.
Most people that know and loved Jamie have found it extraordinarily hard continuing without him, but the days pass and here we are. Over the last year this website has grown as his writings, music and thoughts have been added although there is still more to be put up.  For those who have missed his voice and his laugh, check out some of his messages on his Dictaphone. Most are funny, thoughtful but too short. Please sign the guestbook and say how you knew him if you can or spend some time just listening to the tacks that he loved.

Please follow this link to see images that have not been seen before, gathered from his laptop. The track is by Peter Gabriel who I will say is not someone who would have been James’ first choice. He did listen to him as a teenager but although he loved the ‘real world’ vibe but there was never a enough groove in there for him. Still, his music leaks of everyone page of this website. Perhaps he wouldn’t begrudge one page of sentimentality – providing a drink and a smoke followed to provoke laughter, arguments and joy.

So, one year on we raise a glass again to our lost son, brother, lover, uncle, friend, work mate, school friend, tamer of sounds, acoustic dreamer, argumentative bugger, visionary of studios and collaborative harmonies. Have a drink. Have a smoke. Shout over the person talking. Laugh until you can’t breathe. Close your eyes look for truth in drum rhythms, dancing bodies or the lights on a sound desk. Another year passes and more will follow but Jamie lived for the moment and you are in one. Now.

Play tune here

Birthday Lightning…

Today Jamie would be been 41.

It is hard to think that this time last year we were laughing, drinking and playing mad percussion in my living room.

Jamie was thin – had got quickly thin but none of us really worried.

He had puched his body to the edge all his life – his body was bound to protest wasn’t it?

A few weeks rest, some vitamins, some good green veggies and the odd can of condensed milk (the vice he kept far more secret that the drug he tool!) and he would be fine.

Shows how wrong we were.

Many people have asked me why Jamie had to leave us? Was it his time? Was it Karma? Was it his lifestyle?

Yes, it is true that Jamie chose to life his life by balancing risk with pleasure, coped with fear by anger and joyously trampled on what he saw was the safe and the boring.

Yet, in the end. no-one knows why his life was cut so terribly short.

We all have seen at time in our lives,  in dark nights or stormy grey days, the  sharp bolt of lighting that suddenly reaches down and connects, scorching and final,  with ground.

Most of the time, in spite of its terrifying suggestion of things beyond our control  it actually means very little;  some tiles of a roof, a blown phone line or  something else innocuous.

These consequences hide the power that passed us by.

Yet, sometime time we stare in awe and fear when we see a lighting struck oak tree

Even with its deep thick roots that have dug deep and intertwined into the deep  ground, even with  its solid bark and its vibrant green leaves,  it has been suddenly cut down, sometimes even cut along its very centre!

We don’t understand why this time was different.

Why this solid, seemly everlasting life-force is now broken, the essence of it ebbing away.

There seems no reason why today was any different than yesterday but still it was today the lightning struck and all the world, from microcosm to passing stranger, knows that something significant has been lost.

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Raise a glass or three  (see Jamie’s page on Facebook) and say Happy Birthday to James Eade.

We are still left shocked and wondering but life, it seems, carries on.

Malta & Baz.. Most drunk indeed.. “Who are you”

It is far better, you will see

To die fighting for what you believe

As long as tis pure and just

& the harmony & truth in your heart, be just

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