Phil Knows - A 50th Birthday Tribute to a Best Man

Irony is a wonderful thing, the root of British humour.  No one revels in it more than my friend Phil and he has turned exploiting irony for amusement into an art form.  His love of the absurd is infectious and indefatigable. On too many occasions to count he has brought tears to my eyes, crying with laughter tears, thanks to his swiftly conceived, sardonically delivered nuggets of wry wit.  But few of the funniest people in life are also the nicest, almost as if you sometimes need a slightly nasty side to take the piss.  Phil bucks this trend.  I say 'nicest' but 'nice' is a rubbish word, almost meaningless due its lack of specificity.  But I struggle to describe adequately what I mean by 'nice' without descending into the sort of mawkish sentiment that Phil would rightly scoff at, with a comic turned up lip and frown and a shrug like the ubiquitous Alan Partridge GIF.  So let's get the mushy bit out of the way quickly.  Phil has shown to me over the decades genuine warmth and consideration and a forgiving nature for the times when I was younger and acted like a prick; he is a role model in how he lives his life, sticking to his principles, never succumbing to vanity and showing wonderful devotion to his family; and as a friend he has been loyal, consistent and supportive.  He has always been a measure against which I check myself when I stray towards self-indulgent, egocentric, attention-seeking behaviours, because he is the apotheosis of those sins.  And he is a sage, someone whose opinion everyone values, because it comes from an intelligent, logical and compassionate place; hence the oft-used response of 'Phil Knows' (though, with classic absurdity, he turned this into 'Feel Nose' by always stroking his nose in response to anyone saying that).

He lives in Shrewsbury and isn't one for too much social media contact, so it would have been easy to lose touch over the 30+ years in which I've known him, and indeed we have sometimes gone a long time without much contact.  But now we meet up each year with other university mates in the central location of Birmingham and do what we used to do as students by spending a day drinking beer, moving from pub to pub and making each other laugh out loud with the same sort of nonsense we indulged in back in 1988.  And that is enough to remind me that Phil is the best of men, as he was at my wedding where I chose him alongside my brother and oldest school friend, Dalboy, as my 3 official Best Men.  He's the best of men and the best of friends.  And to return to irony, as the most self-effacing of people I have ever met, he will probably cringe all the way through this tribute and feel slightly embarrassed at (but nonetheless appreciative of) the fact that I have written it to mark his 50th birthday today.

So, brazen sentiment aside, let me now focus on something of the frivolous and the absurd nature of my experience of Phil.  There are enough tales to fill a comic novel, but I will edit myself down to half a dozen or so.

I first met Phil in Mansfield Hall of Residence at the University of Reading in September 1988.  We were brought together by the sort of self-absorbed dickhead that we both thereafter came to view with gentle contempt, a lad who dragged everyone to the pub that first night in a fit of attention-seeking social engineering.  Over the next few weeks, our social group formed, with Phil as the reluctant leader and his room the 'place to be' for our gang of equally self-deprecating misfits.  It was Phil who recognised the bond that held us together - crapness - and it was he who created what became a long running joke, how our lives can be measured against an imaginary 'crap scale'.  He took the joke further by reminding us of a line from Blackadder to describe each situation any of us got into in which things (typically) went wrong: 'At home to Mr Cock-Up'.

So often, Phil reminded us that Mr Cock Up was with us and at no time more so than when a few of us went Inter-Railing around Europe.  One incident in a catalogue of disasters was Phil's ill-timed, horrendously loud fart, which terminated a rare opportunity in which I was being successful in chatting up a girl.  I say 'successful'... we were in Munich and she was German and our friend Geoff translated using the limited amount of O' Level German that he could remember.  At some point while she was explaining how many pets she had, Phil, who was sat next to me on the ground with his knees up and legs parted, let rip with a pavement-shattering 'PPPPHHHHAAAAARRRRRPPPPPPP'.  As if his bottom had decided it had had enough of all this nonsense and was shouting in protest.  The German girl consequently decided it was time to bid us 'Auf Wiedersehen'.

Phil not only holds the record for the most ill-timed fart in my experience, but possibly the smelliest.  He once strolled into my room in hall and silently started at me with a deadpan expression as I chattered to him nonchalantly, until the point at which I wondered why he wasn't answering me.  A grin spread across his face at the same time as his rancid fart spread its way towards my nostrils.  He hadn't come in to talk.  He'd come to leave me that gift.

Phil laughs at himself rather than ever takes himself too seriously, which means that when he laughs at you, you just want to join in.  He reminds me regularly that I have a 'funny shaped head' and after I once told him that the 'fat, smelly. thick kid in our class at school was nicknamed Flump' he replied with, "But you were the fat, smelly, thick kid in your class at school, so you must be Flump" and he has called me Flump regularly ever since.  His lack of malice is that disarming that he can laugh at people's misfortunes if there is something comic about them and no one ever minds.  I once went into a shop with him and there was no one to be seen, so we waited a minute or two before hearing a quiet voice from behind the counter calling, "Help!  Help!"  We looked over to see a old woman lying on the floor.  "Are you ok?" one of us asked.  "I've fallen over," she replied, comically stating the obvious.  We helped her up and checked she was OK, but afterwards we found that the whole thing was making us laugh uncontrollably due to the sheer absurdity of this woman lying on the floor and feeling the need to explain that she was there because she fell over, as opposed to perhaps choosing it as place to sleep or trying to polish the tiles with the back of her dress.

University threw up a number of pretentious wankers, people who created affectations to make themselves more interesting, made up their own nicknames on arrival or played guitar in front of others in an effort to be impressive.  Phil managed to play guitar in front of us regularly (and actually quite beautifully) without EVER appearing to be like those attention-seekers.  And that's because he just did it for his own satisfaction and we just happened to be in his room all the time; so why not?  He never said, 'Listen to this!'  But we did listen and it became a feature of our lives at the time.  That and his choices of records to put on - Jethro Tull and early Genesis (unfashionably and with pride) and more contemporary stuff from that time like The Waterboys and The Sundays.  I've seen both Tull and the Waterboys in concert with Phil, both amazing gigs, both all the better for sharing the experience and love of their music with him.

Anyway, that's all just the tip of the iceberg, but a flavour of my good friend, Phil.  Happy half-century mate.  I will raise a pint of bitter to you tonight and look forward to another 50 years of pub-crawls, laughing at all the nonsense the world throws up and the unwelcomed intrusion of the odd ill-timed fart.