The wrong David Harrison

Louise would have been amused. As it was, two years ago as she began to get ill, and as her illness then took over, and swept us all into a dark panic that we would lose her, we were helpless. Eager for any scrap of information, any chance of contact, any opportunity to contribute, we milled around in an ether-cloud of emails, phone calls and facebook chat.

Eventually, and mainly (it’s okay to say now) for Louise to be in touch with people without actually seeing them, I created a facebook group. She didn’t want an endless line of friends at her door, paying respects, weeping and falling apart. We could post messages, and once in a while I’d print them out and give them to Heather to take to Louise. Heather held the exalted position of Personal Contact. From time to time, Louise would dictate an email and George would send it to me. I’d post that to the page, and it seemed to work okay. It became the ‘official’ way to contact her. I was something like the press officer.

Facebook privacy dictated that I could invite any of Louise’s friends who were not on Facebook to the group by email. However, and weirdly, I could only invite to the group those friends of hers who were already on Facebook by my becoming friends with them on Facebook first. As the group gained members, I began to receive friend requests from people I’d never heard of, all of whom turned out to be friends of Louise.

Keep up, dear reader, this gets better.

Out of the blue, I received a request from Franceska who seemed especially pleased (and a little surprised) to have found me on Facebook. We had, it was true, a friend in common in Mo. Except Mo was a friend of Louise’s and I’d never met her. Franceska had seen that Mo was a friend of David Harrison and excitedly requested my friendship. I politely suggested I might not be the David Harrison she was looking for and she wrote back that, yes, it seemed that her David Harrison was someone else entirely, but that I seemed nice enough, so we should be friends anyway. I agreed.

And so the die was set. Over time, I’ve had a number of friend requests from friends of the other David Harrison. I explain that I’m the wrong one, and the reason why I’m friends with mutual friends of theirs. Mostly they think it’s amusing, and I offer to be their surrogate David Harrison. Occasionally, if the other David Harrison gets mentioned in a post or tagged, I contribute in character. I now have quite a collection of friendships from a social circle going back to St Martins in the ’80s. If the other David Harrison ever joins Facebook (I’m assured this is unlikely) it would make sense for him just to take over my profile, as most of his pals are already there.

Elmaz is one such. And when Elmaz announced that she was coming over on a visit from New York to London with her gooner son, I asked whether she’d like me to get a couple of tickets to the Emirates for her. I wasn’t fussed about seeing Blackpool, so she could have ours. Tickets secured, we arranged to meet at the London Eye to hand them over. The boys locked into each other immediately, and we all became great pals in an instant. We wheeled across the London skyline and chatted like, well, friends. We had lunch, at Wagamama on the South Bank, and Dex and Tolan drenched themselves in the fountain, and a great time was had by all.

And, in the way these things happen, the ceaselessly thoughtful Ali texted saying she had a couple of spares for the match and would I like them. And Ali’s tickets were of the best Season variety, perched right at the front of the North Bank in the upper tier. Couldn’t have been further from mine in the Family Enclosure, downstairs at the other end of the ground. So we all met up again, at Highbury this time, and the boys looned and mentalised to their hearts’ content, and Elmaz and I already knew, by the time we had forced an egg and chips down them, that we would send the boys in on their own. Elmaz and I spent most of the first half taking photos of the crowd and zooming in as far as possible. I knew the seat numbers. I checked with a steward against his ground map. They were nowhere to be seen. There were, ominously, two empty seats where they should have been. And famously at the Emirates mobile phone reception is shit. We couldn’t reach them. We were both determined not to fret too much, and by half time, with Arsenal 3-0 up, a text finally came through from Dex. ‘Dad, can I have another Pepsi, I dropped mine’. Whatever it was they were up to, they were clearly not in danger.

Turns out, they had wangled seats in the wheelchair stand at the back of the lower tier, because their original seats were behind some very tall people. And, as Dex explained, the guy next to them was ‘so fat his thigh was actually on my seat’.

We left the carnage of the six-nil at the final whistle for the relatively sedate comforts of Upper Street. Hev joined us and we washed up, with two very tired and very excited boys, at Pizza Express. I am the wrong David Harrison, it’s true. But I wouldn’t swap for anything.