Someday Never comes

“We must have a beer,” I messaged. “It’s been far too long.”

“I can get the bus and meet you in town,” he replied.

“We’ll sort it,” I confirmed. “Someday soon.”

But we didn’t. There was always something that got in the way. Someday never comes.

I may have met Steve Slade in the 1980s on a picket line at the now flattened Tollgate House in Bristol, where he worked as a civil servant, or perhaps slightly later that day in the pub, probably the Phoenix. I had finished picket duty where I worked in Bedminster and met up with other trade unionists in town. I was drawn to this blonde floppy-haired bespectacled man and the draw never left me. Everyone called him Sladey. I followed suit.

We went to boozy union conferences – our union was CPSA – the most memorable being in Blackpool in 1987. What happens at conference stays at conference but suffice to say after eight nights on dubious northern ales, in a B&B that cost me £40 (for eight nights, not one), and a boozy return train journey home in a shambolic card school, it took a further eight nights to recover. And no one made me laugh more than Sladey.

We were, for our (many) sins, Bristol Rovers fans and we began to meet before matches in a small bar in the stadium called ‘The Blues Bar’. A small group of us got together on matchdays and something kind of clicked. The club was in a mess, the team was in an even bigger mess, but from a footballing point-of-view they were my happiest days as a Gashead.

Most of us in our little group wrote for the matchday programme The Pirate and, edited by the brilliant Keith Brookman, it became the award-winning Pirate year in, year out. And the absolute highlight for me was Sladey’s sharp, clever and often very funny piece, ONB@B, which stood for Old, New, Borrowed and Blue, and just happened to be the title of an album by the popular beat combo outfit Slade. (Geddit?) Most writers’ columns had a reference to ‘blue’, the team colours, or ‘Pirate’, the team’s traditional nickname. We never planned what to write and somehow never managed to duplicate what the other was writing, until one fateful day when Keith was producing a shorter edition for a cup match against Boston United. Sladey and I were two of the columnists asked to write, so we did. Unfortunately, we both used the same joke, along the lines of we had ‘More Than A Feeling’ – a hit tune by the band Boston – we were going to win. “Don’t you two talk to each other?” sighed our long-suffering editor, Keith. We did, but never about what we were going to write, probably because neither of us had a clue what we would be writing about until we sat in front of the computer screen.

Our apparent success writing for the programme saw us elevated to Bristol Post columnists in 2006, a column we shared weekly until one day there was a split in the boardroom.  We supported the modernisers and agents of change, who were defeated, whereupon the club establishment not only removed us from the programme, they connived to have us removed from the (unpaid) Bristol Post column. Nothing at BRFC was ever the same again.

Although we drifted from the football club, we stayed close. We went to rock concerts together, memorably seeing Creedence Clearwater Revival genius John Fogerty at the Hammersmith Apollo and later Wembley Arena. Although both gigs were fantastic, it was the genius of Sladey I will remember most. Sladey lived by the cork board in the kitchen. If something wasn’t on the board, it wasn’t happening and didn’t matter. And so it was that Sladey, who had been deputed to look after the tickets for Hammersmith, left them on said board, remembering only as we thundered along the M4 to London. A frantic succession of phone calls to the venue and to his long-suffering wife Nic saved the day. For the Wembley show, Sladey did remember the tickets and after a swift half before the show we reached Wembley. Stewards asked us to deposit rubbish in the huge bins by the entrance. In a moment of sheer genius, he managed to throw our tickets in the bin, whereupon we had to pull the bin down and sort through all manner of rubbish to find them. Was he embarrassed? Of course not.

As befits a couple of die hard Bristolians, we were both fans of the Wigan Warriors rugby league club and attended a number of games over the years, including memorably a couple of Grand Finals at Old Trafford. We also travelled to Wembley Stadium to see England lose a World Cup semi-final against New Zealand in 2013. He was a joy to be with and there was never a moment’s silence with Sladey around.

His love, and encyclopaedic knowledge, of the works of William Shakespeare was front and centre of everything he loved – a love we didn’t share, by the way! – and he was the non-believer who loved church buildings.

When Covid struck in 2020, we exchanged messages and agreed that when it became possible, we would get together for that long-awaited beer. Someday soon. Then, earlier this year, we messaged again. Someday soon. Then, on the morning of Friday 13th May, we learned that he was undergoing life-saving cancer surgery.

We messaged frequently, agreeing that once his recovery was underway, we would reassemble the Blues Bar regulars and have another jolly boys outing. We would all travel to Wigan for a rugby league match, maybe even, if Wigan made it to Old Trafford for another Grand Final. We would definitely do it. Someday soon. But someday never came.

Heartbreakingly, the news came through yesterday that Sladey died peacefully on Monday 18th July. I realised I didn’t just like him, I loved him. I had not just lost a friend, I had lost a soul mate. And if there was now this enormous hole in my world it would be a pin prick compared to that being felt by his close family who loved him most. Already I missed him and immediately I regretted the someday soons, because I know, and have always known, that someday never comes.

We are all stardust and Sladey’s will always shine the brightest.