I WISH you’d known my friend Rich. You’d have liked him. He’d have made you laugh. He made everyone laugh. There was much more to him than comic timing, of course. He was clever, generous, knowledgeable and empathetic. But what people tended to remark on - what they would talk about after he died two years ago tomorrow (Monday) - was how damned funny he was. It took me a long time to understand that being funny was sometimes a deflection from deeper issues. And even then, I never figured out what to do about it.

My husband Graeme and I met Rich when we were 19 and studying at Glasgow University. The two of them co-edited the student newspaper, while I co-edited the magazine. Graeme and I weren’t going out at that point; we were just three friends having a blast. Over the course of a lifetime, there are a handful of moments you perceive as indelible even as you are living them. One afternoon, we borrowed a camera and snuck out onto the roof of the John McIntyre building where we messed around, taking photographs of one another. High above the quads, the world was ours for the conquering.

Another afternoon, we went off to Loch Lomond and drank bottles of Merrydown in the sun. Those endless days; although, in truth, they lasted less than 12 months. By the time we graduated, Graeme and I were “an item,” heading off for a journalism course in Cardiff, while Rich stayed in Scotland to earn some money with the intention of applying the following year.

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With no social media, our friendship might have petered out then, except that - in July 1990 - Rich was accepted for a traineeship on the Leicester Mercury where I was already working. With Graeme working on the Derby Evening Telegraph, it made sense for us all to move into a house in Loughborough together.

My memories of the next 18 months are stroboscopic. The stories we chased by day. The stories we told in the Queen Vic by night. House parties. Barbecues by the canal. Sunday lunches at The Old Mill. REM/Sinéad O’Connor/Elvis Costello on the CD player. Rich with his guitar singing Jethro Tull. Too much alcohol, not enough sleep. There are no photographs of us in Leicestershire in which we are not holding glasses. Did Rich drink more recklessly than the rest of us? If he did, then we egged him on. He was never more entertaining than when he had a drink in him. 

There was a succession of weddings, including ours. Rich was Graeme’s best man, and a fine job he made of it. At the tail-end of 1991, Graeme and I got jobs in Newcastle. “Keep looking behind you; I might follow,” Rich wrote on my Mercury leaving card.

Mentally and physically, he was struggling, but he hadn’t lost his impish charm.

He didn’t, though. He stayed in Leicester and became a successful journalist, holding politicians to account, covering the war in Kosovo, giving a voice to the disenfranchised. He got married, too, and had two beautiful children. We kept in touch, met up for all the big events: the births of the babies, summer breaks, Christmases, a big Mercury reunion at which he did a pitch-perfect impression of our ex-editor, all of our 40th birthdays.

I don’t know when things started to go wrong and, in any case, it isn’t my story to tell.  All I know is that work and life took its toll on his mental health. From a typical west of Scotland background, he was, perhaps, slow to seek help. He and his wife separated. He moved to London and then back to Leicester. Contact became more erratic. He would phone at odd hours; sometimes he had been drinking.

By early 2018, Rich was very unwell. Another old friend asked if he wanted to move in with him, so he came back to Scotland and began going to AA meetings. We saw him regularly; he’d come for dinner or we’d meet in town. Mentally and physically, he was struggling, but he hadn’t lost his impish charm. He reacquainted himself with our kids. Godfather to our middle son, he embraced the role of champion-cum-corruptive influence, buying him a winning bet on a horse for his 18th. Despite supporting Rangers, he’d come to Hamilton Accies matches to cheer his football-playing godson on, though his chant of: “He’s fab, he’s great, he’s Number 28” never quite caught on.

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At the end of 2019, Rich was given his own tenancy in Maryhill. It was a hopeful time. He liked to tour the charity shops snapping up bargains. We bought him a guitar and a Christmas tree. That night he walked round the block so he could see the lights twinkling in his own window. On January 25, he had us round for a dry Burns night: haggis, tatties, neeps, but no whisky.

When Covid struck and lockdown was announced, one of my first thoughts was: “How will Rich cope?” But in the beginning he did OK. He was, by then, caring for men with learning disabilities, a job which curtailed his drinking, and to which his affinity with people made him ideally suited. Every time we phoned or - once restrictions had eased - walked in the Botanic Gardens, he would talk about those men with affection.

At the beginning of 2021, he lost his job. His mental health problems began to spiral. The lack of joined-up services didn’t help. In the grip of a crisis, he was referred to an alcohol recovery service and put on a waiting list for detox. Unfortunately, he was taken in earlier than scheduled as a result of a cancellation, so there was no pre-planning and very little support when he returned home. Graeme and I had Covid when he was discharged and, by the time we tested negative, he was drinking again.

I sometimes wonder what I was doing the moment Rich died.

Rich’s physical health was also declining, though it was difficult to get to the bottom of what exactly was wrong. One night, in early September, we went to see John Grant at the Barrowlands. He hadn’t consumed any alcohol that night, but his back was too sore to stand for any length of time.

Rich died around seven weeks later on Saturday, October 30 - less than a fortnight shy of his 55th birthday. I hadn’t heard from him for a few days, but I wasn’t properly worried until the Monday. On the Tuesday, I phoned the alcohol recovery service and asked them to carry out a welfare check. I have since been informed they already knew he was dead when I called, but they did not tell me. The following morning, having heard nothing, I phoned the police who broke the news.

I sometimes wonder what I was doing the moment Rich died. That morning, I’d been to Tam Shepherds Trick Shop and bought a bright blue Hallowe’en wig. Maybe I was messing around taking photos of myself. But the fact is none of us will ever know because an ambulance, called at 5.55pm after he became ill on his Maryhill stairwell, took more than five hours to arrive; and, by then, he was gone.

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We only learned of this delay from a tabloid newspaper. Graeme saw it first. I heard him shouting from the other room. “Scots man dies alone on tenement stairs,” the headline read. That word:  “alone” - like an ice pick to the heart. The story quoted the Scottish Ambulance Service extending their sincere apologies and condolences to his family. But I knew his family had not been contacted.

A few days later, Rich’s death was being co-opted to further various agendas at First Minister’s Questions. To hear his name in the mouths of politicians who would - I suspect - have crossed the road if they had seen him coming, compounded our grief in a way I will never be able to properly articulate.

I’m not much into laying blame. When the Scottish Ambulance Service publishes its report, it will be for others closer to Rich than us to react. As for lessons that should be learned, I have enough of my own to process. I will always believe, though, that the stigma that surrounds alcohol use fed into the system’s perception of Rich’s “worthiness” as a human being. That must change. And I’d like to see services recognise the benefits of involving family and friends in the care of vulnerable individuals, rather than pushing them away. There were enough people who wanted to support Rich; we just didn’t always know how best to do that.

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Graeme and I still think about him every day. His presence is all around us: in the typewriter-shaped pen holder he bought when I turned our box room into a study, in the Oor Wullie cartoon he bought us the Christmas before he died, and in his quirky sayings that have become absorbed into our family’s daily conversation. His now-adult children come to visit us from time to time. It is the greatest privilege to have them in our lives, though sometimes it feels like theft.

What would he have made of this piece, I wonder, Rich, who read every word I wrote right up until the end? He might, conceivably, have accused me of being performative. Or he might have said: “Christ, you can’t go to the toilet without columnising about it: What took you SO LONG?”

One thing he’d definitely have remarked on is the dearth of jokes. So here is one he told at our “mixed” wedding after being asked to “keep off religion”. “Oh, the weather was wild when Hamilton Accies beat Rangers 1-0 at Ibrox. Billy and Jimmy were jubilant as they battled their way home through the rain. But, as the hail bit and a gale blew, it got too much for Billy who collapsed at the side of the road. ‘Jimmy, Jimmy, get me a priest,’ he begged. ‘Wait a wee minute,’ Jimmy said: ‘Aren’t  you a… Protestant?’ ‘Yes I am,’ replied Billy, “but you can’t bring a minister out on a night like this’.” Boom tish. He told it better than me.

Another thing Rich used to do was send trite messages with the line “in the words of the existentialist philosopher” in front of them. The last one he sent me read: “In the words of the existentialist philosopher Gloria Estefan: ‘Time flies’.” It does, Rich; it really does.

The fee for this piece will be donated to Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol and Drugs.

The See Beyond Scotland campaign also works to highlight the devastating impact the loss of a life to alcohol or drugs has on family and friends left behind.