For Margaret Wilson - 'The bells of St Stephen's, tolling for Mum', by Tony Wilson - 2025

8 May 2025, Leonda, Hawthorn, Melbourne, Australia

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I’ve wondered where I might be when the terrible day arrived. I would never have guessed 16000 kilometres away in an Airbnb in Budapest, barely awake but already trying to share a Dave Barry article about his prostate on the family group chat. It was Dad who called, dialing my phone number that has and always will end with Mum’s birthday 10.06.45, and I could tell by the tremor in his breathing that this was it. This was the day. I was cold all over before he started speaking: ‘Tony, I’m so sorry I have to tell you this but your mother, your beautiful mum who we’ve all loved so much, died today.’

Two hours later, Polly and I were in the square in front of St Stephens when the bells started ringing. We stepped into the middle of the square, and the bells just rang and rang and rang. We stood shoulder to shoulder, gazing up at this glorious cathedral, and the deafening cacophony didn’t let up. On and on it went. People began to assemble on the church steps, hundreds of people, but Polly and I didn’t move, squinting into the sun and the spires, faces flushed, tears streaming, and it all continued for nearly an hour. The bells of St Stephens, tolling for Mum.

Look it’s possible they were also tolling for the Pope, who died an hour earlier, but I’m going to say they were for Mum. And although none of us Wilsons are particularly religious, I did picture her at the gates of heaven, and I imagined a carnival atmosphere up there, just a great day to be at the pearly gates. And I thought two things. I thought firstly, there’s absolutely no way my beautiful, kind, generous mother isn’t getting into heaven. And secondly, I really hope she doesn’t let the Pope queue jump.

Of course Mum wouldn’t want me dwelling for too long at the gates of heaven in this eulogy. There’s a reason we’re at a reception centre and not a church. She was raised a North Balwyn Methodist, the eldest of five girls, and lived the tearaway social life you’d expect from North Balwyn Methodists in the 50s and early 60s. Even now, if an organist strays into this place and leans on the opening notes of ‘All People Who on Earth Do Dwell’, the three remaining Voutier girls will leap to their feet, ready for choral action. I’m not even ruling Mum out.

She was so smart, such an academic talent. In Year 7, she won a scholarship to MLC, but her father didn’t let her take it up because with four girls following, it might not be fair on everyone. Later, she graduated near the top of her class at Balwyn High, and went to Melbourne Uni to study Science and a Dip Ed. Teaching wasn’t her first choice, but her father again had strong views, this time that his daughters choose either nursing or teaching. These were the good jobs for girls, he reckoned, and that’s where the Commonwealth funded scholarships were too. Mum actually loved science, loved her science friends, although teaching not so much. A lot of the Year 12 boys at Benalla High asked her out during her teaching training year and she wasn’t a fan of that. She did courses throughout her life — computing courses in the early days of the Logo programming language, horticultural courses at Burnley, somehow fitting it all in between parenting four children. When she thought Sam’s Year 12 biology teacher was missing the mark, she purchased the first year uni text book and taught her the course herself. They got 100%. They got into medicine. Pippa did the same a few years later. Sam gave an amazing speech at Mum’s 75th birthday about women of Mum’s generation and the sacrifices they made. So much of her talent, her phenomenal talent, was lavished on us.

She was a spectacular beauty, and it’s been a running joke amongst her four children that her puny, pretty genes were no match for dad’s pale balding genetic headkickers. We don’t care though. Who wants to be a nine or a ten anyway? It’s character building down in the sixes and sevens. I for one can walk past any building site and nobody ever hassles me.

It also gave Mum things to work on. It was impossible to enter a room without her commenting on my appearance. ‘Do you want me to shave your neck, darling?’ ‘What are you taking for your face rash? Do you think it’s because you’re drinking milk? I think it might be the dairy. Look at your nails! You can’t let them get like that? Do you want me to cut them? Does Tam cut them for you?’

When I applied for Race Around the World in 1998, and made it to the finals, Mum had one of her greatest grooming masterstrokes. ‘I think you should tint your eyelashes’ she said. ‘It’ll work, I promise you, make your eyes seem bigger.’ A day or two later, I was in a salon — yes, we Wilson kids are nothing if not compliant — getting my lashes done. Six months later, me and my long irresistible lashes won Race Around the World. Was it all because of the eyelashes? Well we’ll never know, but, yes, yes Mum, it was.

Mum had her own television moment three decades earlier. In 1969, Dad was playing league footy at Hawthorn and the Sporting Globe and Channel 7 had a Miss Footy competition. The idea was that wives and girlfriends were circled in the paper, and for that glory alone you won you $5, some Dr Scholl’s orthopaedic sandals, a Volutis perm styled by Lillian and Antonio, and dinner at the Southern Cross Hotel. It was also an entry ticket to the Miss Footy Trivia Quiz on Channel 7s World of Sport. Mum’s face got circled but she was initially indifferent. The truth was she already had a pair of orthopaedic sandals and knew absolutely nothing about footy — also, the prize the previous year had been a trip to Mildura.

It all changed though when details of the 1969 prize were released. It was an all-expenses trip to Japan and Hong Kong, staying at the five star Mandarin hotels. The total value of the trip was more than Dad’s annual salary as a teacher. They’d been married two years and neither of them had ever been overseas before.

And so Mum rote learned the history of football, basically the whole lot, from Brownlow Medallists to club theme songs, club presidents, everything. Dad was her tutor and put lists all over the house. I can’t imagine how exciting this must have been for him. His young, beautiful bride whispering John Coleman’s career goalkicking stats into his ear. Mum learned it all, of course she did, and breezed into the last eight, then the last four, only to play out two tense grand final draws with Lyn Grinlington, a young teenage Hawks fan who, unlike Mum, actually liked football. Their rivalry captured the sporting world in the spring of 1969. ‘Beauty and Brains too!’ is one article we have clipped from the Herald. Another went with ‘Quiz Cuties at it Again’. In the end, Mum was simply too good. The winning question was ‘Which Richmond premiership player before the war coached a different team to a premiership after the war?’ The answer I hear you screaming is — Checker Hughes. Mum knew it, Lyn didn’t, and finally, gloriously, they were off to Japan and Hong Kong. Second prize was $50 worth of hair care products.

Between 1971 and 1979 she had the four of us, and she lavished so much love in our direction, it’s really difficult to describe. But she was demanding too. I only have to say words like Suzuki method, and Montessori technique for you to get a bit of an idea. She also convinced pre school Samantha that frozen peas were lollies. Imagine Sam’s surprise when she went to her first birthday party in prep. When Mum picked her up, the host mum said to our Mum, ‘I’m worried she’s going to be sick. She’s had nine chocolate crackles’. Ah Sam. What a moment. It’s hard to go back to frozen peas after copher.

She was also fanatical about restricting television, ‘half an hour a day, that’s it, then homework or reading.’ It was an ongoing espionage battle. Ned was our sentry, listening for the crunch of tyres on gravel when she was coming back from the shops. Sometimes, like a secret agent, she’d attempt surprise attacks, parking down the street and then sprinting in to place hand or cheek again the back of the box to feel if it was warm. If the Stasi caught us watching more than Get Smart, we’d be banned from Get Smart the following night. There were no real winners in this war. When I think about it, it’s an utter disgrace how many series she binged over the last few years. I should at least once have hid outside in the bushes and then jumped out. ‘Mum, no more Bridgeton! Go read your novel!’

Mum didn’t need any motivation to read novels. She was such a prolific reader, the east Melbourne library was a favourite place of hers. Ticking as it did two crucial Margaret Wilson boxes – the ones marked ‘books’ and ‘thrift’.

As a child, she read us everything from Seven Little Australians to The Wind in the Willows to Tolkien. As a teen, she put me onto John Wyndham, Aldous Huxley, JD Salinger, Margaret Atwood, Eli Wiesel, Toni Morrison and Clive James. As an adult she fed me Kate Atkinson, Cormac McCarthy, Kate Grenville, Ann Pratchett, Geraldine Brooks, Christopher Koch, Jennifer Egan and David Mitchell. And so many more, of course. She was never without a book or a reading recommendation. It was the same with the other kids, and the grandkids. She was Margaret Wilson, Mother of Readers. I said in a post this week, my father gave me sport, but my mother gave me words. It’s been difficult to find the right ones now. It’s unbelievable that she’s gone.

She’d even tolerate Macdonalds if it meant we’d read more books. In the eighties, she had a bribery deal going with us. If we went to Balwyn Library to choose new books, she’d allow us the fast food extravagance of a trip to the Maccas that shared the same carpark. One day, we were settling in for the rare treat of a junior burger, when out of nowhere she produced Tupperware containers. And what devilry was this?

They were filled with fresh lettuce, sliced tomatoes, cucumber, sliced cheese. ‘Mum, what are those!’ we hissed. ‘Well — ‘ she said, ‘I think my chopped salad is a fair bit healthier than their chopped salad. And I’ve got a nifty name for the burgers! We can call them Big Mags!

Big Mags. It’s mum’s Abbey Road in her discography of over-parenting.

There are some things I’ll always associate with Mum:

• Stylish clothes

• Fine art

• Bead necklaces

• A mastery of DIY dress ups

• Half finished coffees

• Cross word puzzles

• Tuna mornay

• Chops

• Inadequate sunscreening

• A VTAC insiders knowledge of which VCE subjects get standardised up and which go down;

• Reedy hymn singing

• 3MBS and ABC Classic FM

• Replacement swear words like ‘sheeba’, ‘ruddy’, and ‘blow me down’;

• Apologetic phone calls, ‘I’m sorry are you at work?’;

• Nervous gasps of ‘oh god’ from the passenger seat;

• A love of bargains;

• A desire for two for one surgery – go in for your hip replacement, get your varicose veins done at the same time! It brought untold joy when Harry had his lens columboma and herniated belly button fixed under the same anaesthetic;

• Fine interior decorating and an obsession with things looking stylish. Let’s never forget that Mum made this tasteful grey lid cover for her recycling bin, because she thought the yellow lid was spoiling the ambience of her front yard;

• Hairbrained schemes;

• Scrabble;

• Her hugs at the end of each visit;

• The sense that when I was growing up, I had the best mum – the smartest mum, the most beautiful mum. And it went for dad too. The sense we had the best parents.

None of us were ready for this.

One of the sentences I love most in the eulogy section of Speakola is from Stephen Colbert, whose mother Lorna had eleven children, lost three, lived to 92, and was a supermum on par with our own. In the week of her death he said on his show:

I know it may sound greedy to want more days with a person who lived so long, but the fact that my mother was 92 does not diminish, it only magnifies the enormity of the room whose doors have quietly shut.

The fact is our own Mum’s room could have been so much smaller. I remember I was in the Clyde when I called her in 1993 and she told me that she had bowel cancer with lymphatic involvement. The pub was noisy and it was surreal — a 50-50 chance of survival, a coin toss. I remember feeling numb and sick. We had to face up to the possibility of losing her when she was just 48. Pippa said to me the other day, ‘I couldn’t have handled losing her then. We don’t get more time now, but imagine if we’d lost her then.’ The fact she did that year of chemo, and she did it so bravely and without a ‘why me’, or a word of complaint — and the fact we were lucky — so many people get cancer and just aren’t lucky.

I’m so grateful my beautiful mum got to enjoy old age, got to meet her amazing, talented grandchildren, see then all get to double figures. I couldn’t have handled losing her then either.

I stood alone with Mum’s body on Tuesday and thanked her for everything. I thanked her for giving me life, and for giving me THIS life. She gave all of us her natural intelligence, which is part of the genetic pot luck, but she did everything else with such unbelievable energy and effort. She read to us, she put endless time into every interest or hobby, and she conquered the everyday mayhem of having four children, and Tam and I know, it’s a bloody mountain. Washing, bathing, shopping, medicating, comforting, disciplining, feeding, cleaning up, driving, counselling, in her case, a lot of optometry, just endless, thankless, mothering. Mum did it year after year, and she did it at A+ level.

Mum, I think of you at the end, alone, and it’s heartbreaking. I wish I’d been there to tell you I love you, to thank you for all that you’ve given us. I hope there wasn’t any pain, or if there was, that it was brief, I hope you weren’t too afraid, and that you felt our embrace — of Dad and us kids and your grandkids and your sisters and your friends. I really hope you felt that. We’re your boats that you set free upon the water. I know that you were proud of us. Your last words to me were on the phone at the airport were ‘have a great trip, you’ve earned it’. Well I’ll say the same back to you Mum. Have a great trip. You’ve earned it.

So long, Mum. We’ll miss you and think of you always.

For Chris Daffey: 'I’m not ready for goodbyes when the jokes have run out', by Tony Wilson - 2014

2 January, 2014, Templestowe, Melbourne, Australia

I first met Daff in the Minter Ellison boardroom at Market Street on a hot February day in 1996. We had what I remember as a brief, hilarious chat before the event took a turn when Daff fainted unconscious right in the middle of the party. When his eyes flicked open, there were about fifty people huddled around him and he had about two seconds to think before throwing a hand out from his position lying flat on his back. ‘Chris Daffey,’ he said, without missing a beat.

I knew he was something amazing then and there. I didn’t get to speak to him any more at that function because, in Daff’s words, ‘HR had me in the lifts and out of the building before you could say “public liability insurance”. I later found out that Daff wasn’t as immediately sure about me. Like me, he kept this document with mugshots and profiles of his fellow articled clerks. Unlike me, he pencilled a first impression against each name. ‘R-sole’ [spelled capital R sole] was the designation for future friend James Edwards. I was granted slightly more wiggle room, assessed merely as ‘Possible R-Sole’.

Articles began and so did our friendship. We’d meet at the level one billiards table every day, and spend hours drinking Coke, eating sandwiches and attempting to roll pool balls down the table in such a way that the number would ‘hang’ perfectly still on the side. ‘Ugly’ we’d say when the axis scrambled. ‘Ooooooooh,’ we’d say if we got a perfect release. Whoever got more ‘Ooooohs’ over the lunchtime won. There was always a game with Daff. And always a winner.

It was the early days of email, and god knows how many billable units were wasted as Daff corresponded, not just with me, but with a growing number of Minters colleagues caught in the beam of his charisma. Minters called its email system the ‘Minternet’, and Daff quickly worked out that the template had one important flaw. An unscrupulous sender could just spacebar his own name out of the ‘from’ window, and write the name of any other person he might want to pretend to be.

The result was sheer mayhem. I spent three hours flirting with a girl, thinking I was some chance for a date, without knowing Daff was emailing in falsetto from his cubical on level 8. I then attempted to get Daff back, and indeed had a notable success posing as his then girlfriend Kerry, but I was a man out of my depth. ‘The only thing that mitigates my joy is the knowledge you will get me back,’ I wrote in my moment of triumph, which was exactly the same thing he wrote when the inevitable occurred. Yep, a phone message from my awfulest client wasn’t actually from him. Suspecting nothing, I hastily rang the awfulest client, pleading with him not to take the stupidest course of imaginable. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said to me. ‘What the f*ck are you talking about?’ Yep, Not for the first time, Daff had gone too far.

Amidst all the drudgery of that articles year, we had so much fun. There had been mid-year articled clerk revues before, but Daff turned ours into an extravaganza. In one sketch, he used artfully positioned pot-plants, photocopier lids, chair backs and assorted paraphernalia to film every articled clerk getting about his or her lawyerly tasks, naked. I’ll never forget Ben Liu on his tummy in centrefold pose, his dignity protected by the ‘Hot Stocks’ edition of the BRW. There was the bit in which Daff and I stormed the front foyer of Blakes in chicken suits. There was a sign in the copy room that said ‘Don’t Abuse the Photocopiers’ so Daff thought it would be funny if we found an old one, and filmed ourselves smashing it up with sledge-hammers in the middle of a field, to the Carmina Burana. ‘Twelve Angry Articled Clerks’ we called it. It was such a good time. I sometimes think it was the experience making that mid-year production together that encouraged both of us to pursue creative careers.

Today, I have such conflicted feelings about Daff’s decision to write his novel. It was an agony to watch its progress, not because the output wasn’t terrific, it almost always was, but because the words flowed like treacle. In true Daff style, he kept spreadsheets documenting his daily word count, and the numbers were sometimes in two figures. He’d ring me up, asking for a preference between two words. ‘It doesn’t matter, Daff’ I’d say. ‘Nobody will notice. Just move on.’ But he couldn’t. It had to be perfect. One year became two years, which became three years. He spent one of those at my parents’ holiday place at Red Hill, calling me every night at 5pm when he went outside to watch the rabbits. Daff loved animals. The one member of our family who still doesn’t know he’s gone is his beloved Charley Dog.

The novel, when it finally came out in 2004, was brilliant. The working title was ‘ImpressingJenny’ but it was eventually called A Girl, A Smock, and a Simple Plan. After all those years writing, the publisher assigned a woman who mainly edited gardening titles to whipper snipper Daff’s prose. He fought a lot of battles in the edit, won enough for him to be justly proud of the novel, but perhaps lost the war. He said in his letter that this awful disease has been with him eight years. Like I said, I have really conflicted feelings about this book.

A Girl, A Smock was part-memoir, part-fiction and truly hilarious. Daff’s recall of the primary school universe was phenomenal, and those painstakingly sculpted, comedy maximised-sentences were indeed very nearly perfect. One of my many favourite bits is this:

“You see the way I looked at it, the hardest part about primary school for Lucas must have been his lack of preparation for it. When he first strolled through the gates on his way to Mrs MacCauley’s Prep Grade M, he would have had no idea whatsoever that he’d been handed a business card that said, ‘Lucas Tordby – Dropkick’. In fact, like almost all of us, he would have had quite the opposite idea. Years of being smothered by parental affection and encouragement leaves the average pre-schooler thinking he is the smartest, best-looking, most advanced ‘little bundle of joy’ in the world ever. Parents rarely opt for honesty in assessing their children. No mother ever turns to her six year old daughter and says, ‘Marcy, you’re as dumb as you are hideous, but I Iove you anyway.’ It’s just praise praise and more praise until every little trooper turning up for their first day of school thinks they’re God’s gift to humanity. If only parents fessed up to the lies they’ve told before they packed their kids off to school. If only fathers grabbed their sons by the shoulders before they sailed out the door and said:

“You know all that stuff your mother and I told you about being cute and clever and adorable? Well it’s a bunch of cobblers. You’re actually a bit of a bonehead, Son, and you might cop a little stick out there because of it.’

Daff was so naturally funny, so natural at everything. Writing probably wasn’t even his top talent – his aptitude for maths was frightening, and he could sort and evaluate arguments like no person I’ve ever met. He often said he should have done law-science. These last couple of years I’ve been telling him to become a politician, or a political adviser, or a speech writer, or a barrister, or a public speaking coach or a management consultant or a stock market analyst. His beloved Pop trained in Daff an ear for injustice, and so many of my political views were nurtured by his eloquence for a cause. He could also go completely off tap. Daff had literally hundreds of yahoo email addresses, all of which have been blocked by Andrew Bolt’s blog moderators. Not many people know this, but he was also on Twitter, trading blows with right wing trolls on #auspol. The reason you might not be following him is also quintessentially Daff. When Charmaine joined Twitter and racked up more followers than the then barely-tweeting @chrisdaffey, Daff said that part of her success could be credited to being a woman with a nice looking profile pic. To prove himself right, he took to Twitter as an unbelievably hot looking New Zealand woman named Libby, who just happened to love footy. Dreamteam and politics. Within months, he had a thousand followers. He also received a remarkable number of coffee or dinner requests from left leaning, footy loving males, some of whom were prominent media figures. Libby always declined. She wasn’t that sort of girl.

Some of Libby’s most popular tweets:

“If you watch the Die Hard series backwards, an old bald guy slowly learns how to act.”

“Gina Rinehart launches ‘Seven Step Success In Business’ course. Step 1: Inherit billion dollar mining empire. Steps 2-7: Enjoy.”

“Nick Riewoldt claims ‘outside forces’ destabilising club: “All we want to do is train hard, play footy & take pics of each others nads” #afl”

“Q: What does @AndrewBolt say when he sees himself naked in the mirror? A: God damn it, it’s leaning left again!”

Our friendship was often quite competitive. In our Dreamteam head to head, his team, the Hindsight Mayors leads 10-1 against my team, the Maribynong Mustangs. It is now a small comfort to know that in a time of desperation, this score-line brought untold joy.  He once asked, ‘how much better a footballer do you think you are than me,’ and I said, ‘Put it this way Daff, if I toss this ball in the air for the rest of time, it will be up to me to decide whether you ever get to touch it again.’ We played the game for the next five minutes. It ended with him round-arming me across the back of the head. We went through a phase of entering 25 words or less competitions, and for New Year’s Eve in the Year 2000, Daff won a seven course dinner for ten on the balcony at Southbank overlooking the Yarra and the fireworks. I came second and won a slab of Crown Lager and a bottle opener. When he rang to tell me, I was incredulous, moaning to him that his entry was the worst example of corporate toadying, and that mine was clearly superior. He eventually shut me up by saying, ‘Willo. I’m inviting you! For eff’s sake! If anyone should be complaining it’s me. I’ve beaten you into a long second and you’re a slab and a bottle opener up.’ What a night that ended up being.

Like Dods, Daff would occasionally let me know I was still a ‘new friend’ who still had work to do to get to that Ben, Lawson and Al A-level. Through sheer weight of time together, I got there. During Dreamteam season, we spoke literally every day. In the off season we cooled it off to two or three times a week. Daff was quite possibly better at being a friend than he was at all the other things combined. There are at least five of us who call Daff our best friend. We each only had one Daff. I told him everything. He prided himself on being ‘the vault’. Nothing any of us confided ever went further than Daff.

In 2004 Daff and I travelled overseas together. It was an amazing few weeks full of stories that have peppered the years since. They include:

• Walking the streets of Paris playing a game Daff invented called ‘Bonsoir or Bonsnub’. You pick a Parisian, and with full eye contact and beaming smile, hit them with an enthusiastic ‘Bonsoir’. If you get a bonsoir back, it is a ‘bonsoir’. If not, it is a ‘bonsnub’. Player with most ‘bonsoirs’ wins. There was always a game and there was always a winner.

• Sprinting drunkenly through the cobblestoned streets of Barcelona at midnight, with Daff shouting ‘you have no cartilages, you have no cartilages’ and me shouting back ‘I will chase you down like a dog’. I did chase him down too. Like a dog.

• Daff walking into a hotel bathroom to discover me asleep on the toilet. ‘Oh god, Willo, he said as he woke me up. ‘It’s our Elvis moment.’

• Getting shot at by a Barcelona street kid with a toy bow and arrow. Daff found the kid in the same place the next day and bought his bow and arrow to give to me as a Christmas present. I gave him DVD copies of ‘El Graduado’ and ‘Adios Mr Chips’.

Daff was the most generous friend I’ve ever known. The presents were always spectacular – a carefully curated assortment of chocolates, a calendar of George W Bushisms, a Playstation 3 for Tam’s and my wedding that I now can hardly look at without crying. He was a big kid who loved kid stuff to the end. Swap cards, figurines, light sabres, Junior mints, endless endless Macdonalds. He spent nearly $1000 on footy cards in the year … 2012.  The last time he went to Red Hill he took the skin off his face attempting the steepest part of the hill on a billy cart. No wonder the kids loved him. He played chasey with them like he wanted to, because he actually did. He chased with intent. He chased for hours and hours and hours. It was only the last time he visited that I thought, ‘he’s having to work hard at this today’. I remember telling the kids to give Daff a bit of a rest.

The gift I mentioned on facebook this week is probably the one that means the most to us. When Tam was pregnant with our first, Daff barracked so hard for Polly to be born on his birthday, and when she was, he went around the streets of Melbourne, taking photos to give her so she could know what her city looked like that day. He also gave her newspaper front pages. They were the 24th of January twins, separated 35 years to the day. He even photoshopped his own head on to a baby’s body to put it in his ‘Daff box’. When’s going to be the right day to give her that box, Daff? I can’t believe this is happening.

We all loved you so much, Daff. Polly is wearing the blue butterfly necklace you gave her. She hasn’t said a word to me about it. She just started wearing it as a quiet tribute. Tam is bursting into tears as she plays Wordament, the speed boggle app you got her addicted to. The big Wordament face-off never happened, and now it isn’t going to. Harry, the one you called ‘the circus strongman’ keeps asking ‘is Daff going to come over?’ and I keep having to say that you won’t be coming over now. Jack got to meet you, but now won’t really know you like the others. But I know you were so pleased when he said your name during the last visit. One day I’ll tell him about the sort of person you were. That when he was born in 2011, it was you who read books on cerebral palsy so you could talk to me about it. That it was you who went to this special effort for me. Because you worried how low I was going. And I didn’t do the same for you. Because you didn’t want me to. Because you didn’t want the dynamic of this friendship, this perfect friendship, to change. Because you were the fun one. Well for me, Daff, it has changed, now. I don’t want to be angry, and mostly I’m not, and one day I won’t be at all. How could you have been in so much pain and told so few of us. How could I not have seen it? You say we couldn’t have done anything and I have to believe that we couldn’t. But we’ll never really know if enough was done. How can we?

You once wrote a goodbye for me, Daff. It was for when I was leaving Minters, and it was short and funny — typically brilliant. I’ve kept it along with all your emails from that time. You called it ‘Goodbye Mr Slips’. You dubbed me ‘the William the Conquerer of personal space invasion’. You noted ‘Tony’s tendency to get up close and personal during conversations introduced many lunch companions to the concept of “passive eating”’. You said, ‘Only a fool would sit through a meal with Tony in a suit colour that didn’t match his order.’

They’re the sort of goodbyes we’re supposed to be doing, Daff. Funny, shit-stirring goodbyes. I’m not ready for proper goodbyes. I’m not ready for goodbyes when the jokes have run out. I’m not ready for today. One of the few images I had of old age, was of calling you from a retirement home to complain about Dreamteam. How can we be stuck at 10:1? How can it be forever 10:1?

I’ll miss you so much Daff. My best man and my best friend. I’ll miss you and treasure you for the rest of my life.

I made an episdoe of the podcast dedicated to this speech, our friendship, and an interview I did on Richard Fidler’s Conversations.