Meeting at a pub
After Boris Johnson’s last address as
Prime Minister in front of 10 Downing Street, I was clicking through a few
things as you do online before I in the confluence of many thoughts decided to
search for ‘Keith Shearer Architect’ on Google.
I went out with Keith in 1991; we met
at The Prince Regent on Liverpool Road in Islington, one Sunday afternoon around Easter, I could
not account for what brought him up there from South London where he lived. I
was housesitting for a friend who had gone to Mexico on a street off Caledonian
Road, so this pub was my local even without much event.
Until I met Keith there, I never
struck up a conversation with anyone, I guess I was just seen as someone who
came in, ordered a drink, and sat in a corner until the closing hours. Then
Keith came to say hello, we struck up a conversation and he invited me over to
his place.
A friendship becomes
Later that evening, he brought me back
home where I was housesitting and after he left, I noticed that he had secreted
a £20 note under a book on the table. This was when I was still looking for
work and trying to stick to roles in computing rather than doing something
else.
After that, we met up a few times, I
was invited to a party with his friends and soon we became an item, and I moved
in with him on Christchurch Road in Tulse Hill. Our domestic arrangements were
easy, as he had a lodger who just could not be kicked out of the kitchen for
the want of trying.
Keith was an architect with a firm in
North London and he quite daringly in my view rode a bicycle to work when
cycling on the main roads in London was not fashionable and quite desperately unsafe.
Tremendously talented
He was also a polyglot, he had such an
ear for languages, I was just fascinated in not only his ability to speak
languages but to write in Arabic, Cyrillic, and Japanese kanji. I have now read
that he spoke Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Italian and Serbo-Croat. I
believe he spoke many more languages and one afternoon he bought a Yoruba
language book and started making sentences, he was that gifted.
When I eventually found a job, Keith
helped me with all the formalities in getting references from Lagos and all the
preparations I needed to start before I found my own accommodation, including
the move to my new place. I guess from then we began to drift apart.
6 years later, I returned to live in
London from Ipswich and basically had an apartment on the next road from where
he lived. We met up a few times and after 2 years in London, I was back in
Ipswich and then in the Netherlands for over a decade. We did not keep in
touch.
The memories to remember
However, Keith brought me new
experiences because I attended my first gay pride with him, learnt more about
gay history from him, and my first encounter with someone living with AIDS was a
friend of his who had returned from France to spend his last days, desperately
trying to write his story for which he needed some computing support, which I
provided.
In many ways, I was naïve, not too
understanding of the dynamics of gay relationships and was left to my devices
most of the time. When I returned to the UK, I did try to contact him again,
but my Internet searches indicated he had moved out of London.
The unexpected discovery I made this
morning was that Keith had passed on in May 2021 at the age of 65. That was
quite a shock, he had suffered a heart attack and I would have said Keith was
one of the fittest men around and definitely of his peers too. It is sad news,
but I remember Keith for his sense of fun, his tremendous help that was needed for
me to settle down in the UK, his desire to try new things and his easy speaking
voice that concealed a bundle of talent and ability.
May his soul rest in peace. James Keith Shearer, 1955 – 2021.