My phone rang a few nights ago. It was a friend calling to tell me that his oldest friend, and someone who I knew reasonably well, had died quite unexpectedly. Even now, it has n't quite sunk in. It does n't seem right. I should check with my friend that he actually called me and it's not something I've imagined...except he did, and it's true.

I had known this person on and off for years; occasionally we would meet, usually in a pub, swap stories, tell tales, argue a little, but never in a head-butting manner, joke around, grope towards solutions to all manner of problems, then fold our tents and drift off into the night. He was humorous, heartfelt, and sincere: a good man.

A sudden loss is startling, it's like an earthquake of the emotions: jarring, jolting, everything thrown from side to side. It was in the voice of my friend, a man in shock. The person who had died was his oldest friend. To lose a friend is to lose part of you: that sense of ineffable youth goes - we are now mortal, starkly so; those stories and adventures, inconsequential in all probability to others, but the glue that binds friendship, and in a secular way almost consecrate it, what happens to them now, where do they go, who are they shared with? The continuum is irreparably broken.

I've never heard my friend so lost for words, let alone the sentences to express himself. Numbness is possibly the nearest I can pin it to. Bewildered and confused, certainly. From my own experience (I've lost my mother and father), I can see the likely streets my friend may have to walk: shock, grief, anger (at the fact of someone going so young), and eventually, at a time usually of it's own choosing, acceptance. And everything seems so different, so other. A new lens on life. Everything has altered; the streets are n't the same, nor the buses, the tubes. Places acquire a heightened significance, this is where this happened, that happened.

He was worrying how he might appear at the funeral. There is nothing to worry about. Appear how you want, don't predict behaviour, you're going there to celebrate and to honour a friend.. and part of your life. It's not just an act of remembrance, it's an expression of deep affection. Men are no different to anyone else; we are entitled to show affection, it may be unspoken in the main, communicated through shared experiences and adventures, but it's there, it's profound, so show it.