Lessons in love and last goodbyes From the ridge

WE HAVE just come back from a close friend’s funeral.

I met Sally on my first day at school in the third form (Year 9) back in 1973.

We were being shown around the school by the teacher of our class, chatted and became part of a group of friends in that class. Independently through sport I met Simon in the same year, and we became lifetime mates.

He and Sally began to go out a year or two later and several years after that I was best man at their wedding.

So great friends for 50 years but now after a brave battle with cancer Sally has died, leaving a hole in many hearts, not least my good friend’s. of writing this column, I have written of the lives of several people I’ve been close to or who have had an impact on my own life.

I used to ring him every night from the kennels and talk to him while he lay in his hospital bed about the world outside that he used to be part of.

During the quarter of a century

Gordon was my fat stock drafter, as we said in those days – he would be a prime stock drafter now.

I used to tell him he was the best thing I inherited off the old man.

I was a know-nothing young farmer, and he offered me advice and the wisdom of a fellow who knew the industry well.

When I told him I’d read about his general manager saying in the paper that stock prices would be going up, he laughed and said that they would likely be going down then. And they did. I learnt to be sceptical of seemingly knowledgeable authority figures. He trained me to do “woofers”, where we would draft deep into the lambs at weaning and “woof” them onto the truck. I used the term in an early column and it has now come into the rural lexicon thanks to Gordon.

My mother always took great care of herself and was determinedly against smoking, so it was unfair when she contracted lung cancer and, after a short