November 20th 2015

Three doors down at no.9. That’s where the Badger lived. Today he died.

A character of the old school, he recently celebrated his 80^th birthday. They say that when he was years younger that he was very fond of porter and something of a womaniser but this is not true. How do I know? Sure the same has been said about myself. Groundless vitriol from small minds. People who say such things are in the main mindless morons who have nothing better to occupy their vacant mentalities than peddling malicious gossip.

I have always had the consolation of knowing that criticism and praise have a common denominator; they are only of consequence if they emanate from a credible source! Back to my friend Badger Marlowe. My abiding memory of him will be his taking of the air in better weather by laying out his comfortable chair in the sun outside his front door and soaking in all the proceedings in the estate without ever batting an eyelid. Always reminded me of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino sitting in his porch drinking cans of American beer and scrutinising the neighbouring ‘fish heads’. I never enquired as to why he was called ‘the Badger’. I doubt that anyone really knows but some know-all will try to convince one that he has the answer.

Many anecdotes exist about the disposition and wit of Seamus. My favourite is the ‘Mrs Noonan’ episode. Mrs Noonan lived directly across the road from Seamus in Cloncallow. She had a large family as was the norm at that time. One particular morning as she was getting the children out to school she discovered she had no milk. This was serious as at the time milk was much more of a staple than nowadays. Mrs Noonan did the obvious thing and called across the road to her good neighbour, Seamus, to borrow some milk. She knocked on the door repeatedly. No reply from Seamus. After some time she came to the conclusion that Seamus was still in bed. She went round to the back of the house and knocked on his bedroom window. After a respectable pause Seamus peered blearily out of the opaque window pane. “Are you not up Seameen” she coyly enquired. “Nothin’ to get up on, Mrs Noonan” he responded.

People will remember Seamus as a witty man but there was more to him than that and he certainly wasn’t an open book. Seamus was a clever man who masked his intelligence very well. He reminded me of a shop one regularly passes but doesn’t patronise. The only picture you ever got was the display in the window. Nonetheless he was one of the old brigade and will be missed by many.

“Of all the things in the world the rarest is a civilized man at peace with himself”, wrote the French writer Gontran de Poncins. The Badger was, and is, this man.