The Jesus of DIY

This is the unabridged version of the eulogy that was read at my friend's memorial at Wigtown County Buildings on May 29, 2024.

I love the month of May, I always have. It's possibly my favourite month of the year, yet looking through my Facebook memories I've noticed that May isn't always a good month. May has lots of tragedy attached to it, one way or the other...

I got a text message on April 24 telling me that someone I know had suffered a 'massive heart attack'. Over the next six days, he hung on in, but every time I spoke to his wife it seemed it was just going to be a matter of time before he left us. April finished and May started and still he stuck with us, to the point where I started to hope. I started to think this fabulous giant of a man who had become one of my best friends - ever - might just have the strength and desire to pull through.

Then at a little after 10pm on the 4th of May the phone rang and I knew it wasn't going to be good news. Good news doesn't ring at 10pm; good news waits for the morning and puts a spring in your step. Bad news comes at night; the phone never rings after 10pm unless it's bad news or an emergency... 

In August 2017, I was sitting at the bar of my then local pub The Craft having a pint on my own, when Sharon, who would soon become the landlady of the pub introduced me to George Willan. He had moved to Wigtown with his lovely wife Julie about two weeks after Paula and I had, but they'd been coming up here for months prior because they were renovating the house that would become their wonderful home. Sharon figured we were both new to the place so what better way of starting our new lives than with new friends. She wasn't wrong.

It probably took me and George a few months to start properly talking. Up until that point we were pretty much on nodding terms with the occasional 'how's it going?' thrown in. George was 'that bloke from oop north' that we used to see in the pub. Then we started getting to know each other; then we started arranging to meet in the pub on a regular basis and then started to go out at the weekends with our wives and other 'incomers'.

To say the group of people we fell in with were not the kind of people we'd normally be associated with would be an understatement, but we had started a new life and that meant new things, including people with different politics and views. I remained remarkably even tempered when I'd listen to George's politics - it was clear that where I was so left wing I bordered on communist, he was a bit right wing. Except, it didn't take me long to realise for all of his entrenched ideas, he was actually one of the most decent human beings I'd ever met and as he said to me a couple of months ago - when he was doing some more work to our house - we might not agree with each other's politics, but it didn't stop us from becoming great friends.

George's politics softened an awful lot between 2017 and 2020; he had been a proud Brexiteer when I met him, but by the time Covid was on our doorsteps he'd changed his opinion hugely, saying if the referendum was held then he would have voted to remain. He admitted that he lived in a political bubble in Lancashire - where he came from - in an anti-union, right wing bubble where political debate didn't happen because everyone agreed with each other and if you didn't agree with the mob then you simply kept quiet. Living in Scotland and being subjected to a multitude of different political opinions, this man who often admitted to never having read a novel, listened, cogitated and formed new opinions based on a wider knowledge base. You see this was George to a T. An engineer by trade, everything was a problem to solve, nothing didn't have a solution, if you couldn't find a solution then you needed to think about it for longer. An opinion was there to be challenged or agreed with because not all opinions were the same.

It was about the start of the pandemic that Paula and George hatched a plan to renovate the annex room on the side of our house. George was quite clear, this would be Paula's project, he would just be there as a labourer, but if I want to be honest it would still be a mess if George hadn't taken the job by the scruff and given it a good shake. By the time they'd finished the room we were in full lockdown mode and we began to see just what an absolute saint George actually was...

I need to be clear about something; by this point, we'd known George and Julie for three years; we spent a lot of social time with them - pub crawls, nights out, quizzes, gigs and we were simply not in their league. We weren't in their league as far as drinking was concerned and if you want to talk about making friends then they were Premier League standard. By the time the pandemic started I think everyone in our small town knew George. He was your go to guy for solving problems and it was around this time I started to refer to him as 'The Jesus of DIY' - if you had a problem, it wasn't a problem if George was your friend or even wasn't. 

During the lockdowns, Julie and George became the caretakers for the old, the infirm and those people who were shielding from the worst of the pandemic. Almost every day they would make trips to Newton, Stranraer, even Dumfries to pick up shopping or anything else for others who couldn't get out. As there were no pubs open socialising had stopped, but even socially distanced George and Julie made friends. If you needed an example of proper key workers you looked no further than them, except they were doing this out of the kindness of their hearts and for no remuneration. It was around this time that I started to think they should be nominated for some kind of community award, maybe an OBE or something. They made me feel envious because they offered and gave so much and I wasn't.

After Covid, getting time with the Willans started to become more difficult. They were involved in everything; from committees to volunteering at events; it was clear they were now very much part of the Wigtown community and it was clearer that the local community wanted to have them. George started bowling, took his darts prowess to the Galloway Bar and you would see him in all kinds of unexpected places doing odd jobs, fixing things and renovating the new house they'd bought over the road from the one they lived in. To say No 24 had been a dump would have been an understatement. It was a small bag of rubble but George had a clear idea of what he was going to do with it and he transformed it into a fabulous 5 star holiday home, one that he often referred to as his retirement fund. "We're either going to live there and sell the bigger house or we're going to sell No 24 and live off the profit."

George got Covid twice; the second time he gave it to Paula and I. I have no problems with this as he was putting a new roof on our shed at the time. While I shuffled around the house like a sick old man in a dressing gown, George was on my shed in March 2023, with my ill wife helping him, yet again. It was around this time I started to wonder how we would have survived the last six years without him. The thing was that second bout of covid George had wasn't the worst but it did herald the start of a year of really bad luck and my mate started to sound a little frazzled around the edges. Here is not the place to talk about that, suffice it to say that most of 2023 was a real challenge for the Willan family and I'd often sit and wonder why life would want to kick people so bloody nice when all they deserved was to have a happy peaceful life.

From the moment the annex room was finished, George, Paula and I turned our attention to my kitchen. George just wanted to tear the walls down and see what was behind them and to be honest despite being the person who would pay for it all I was totally up for that - George made DIY an adventure not a chore. However, we wouldn't start work on the kitchen until February of this year and it proved to be a stinker of a job. Because he was a perfectionist, it had to be done right. "Can we do this?" I would say. "No, no. We're going to do it properly, not like the idiot who did it in the first place!" So a job that should have taken about four weeks took eight and by the end of it George was done with kitchens; in fact he seemed done with DIY.

However, many of the problems that had plagued Julie and George during 2023 was sorting itself out. There was light at the end of the tunnel, or so we thought. During the last few days of the kitchen renovation, George said some things to me that didn't register at the time but he seemed determined to ensure that every unfinished job was finished. 

I often thought that coming round our house was a bit like an escape for him at times, not that there was any reason to escape, it was just as though he liked chilling at my place; having a cuppa and a chat about the stuff that's going on and by the time our birthdays arrived (George was one year and one day younger than me), I think our political views were just about merging; George had swayed to the left and I thought some of his ideas - however 'radical' - were beginning to sound quite good. We were firm friends who enjoyed each others' company.

The last time I saw him was on my birthday. He popped round the house with Julie and his younger brother Reg to drop off presents and well wishes. It was a quiz night at the bowling club and they'd harangued both of us for days about coming along, but we had opted against it. He was in a hurry to get to the club house; as a committee member he took his responsibilities very seriously and he was also suffering from a bit of a bad back, but he never complained. The last words I spoke to him was when he was hobbling down the road with his usual big smile on his face, waving.

I texted him happy birthday the next morning and he replied 'many thanks' - that was April 20. Four days later I got the text message from Julie and everything changed...

I can't imagine what number of hells Julie has been through since it happened. The hopes and the crashing lows that happened during the time George was hooked up to machines keeping him alive. Paula and I wandered around in a near silent limbo, neither of us wanting to talk about it because... well, you know why...

You don't often make really good friends in later life and if I want to be brutally honest given my own health problems, I expected George and Julie to be the friends who would be supporting Paula when I was gone, not the other way around. I think Wigtown is a smaller place for George not being in it now. Everywhere you look you will see something George has worked on. I can't look around my house or gardens without seeing his fingerprints everywhere. He was a big gentle man who left an indelible mark on everyone he got to know. I'm really going to miss him, but I think everyone will. 

I'm going to leave you with two thoughts. "A person is not gone, they're just dead." Because George will never be gone; not a day has passed since he died where we haven't talked about him and I expect the same can be said for any family who allowed him into their lives and that will continue long into the future. The other is "When someone dies all they leave is love." No one I know ever said a bad word about George Willan and wherever he is now he knows he was loved. Good night mate.