Carpe Diem! — The Love Detectives

Why did it rock me to my core to be told by my friend, Mike, that I was wasting my life by ignoring my musical ambitions? Simple, really.

I had very recently delivered the eulogy at the memorial service for my lifelong best friend, Chuck, who had lost a valiant battle with bowel cancer. In the same house at school, the same college at Cambridge, each other’s Best Man, godfather to each other’s eldest child, we had navigated our formative years together and were closer than brothers. I had never known such intense sadness.

Chuck Evans in Best Man mode with post-Himalayan beard and quiet waistcoat

Chuck had led an incredibly full life. He had sculled for England and, an accomplished mountaineer from a renowned climbing family, he had led three challenging expeditions to the Himalayas. As I drove home from the memorial service, I reflected that, were the positions reversed, the eulogy would have been short indeed.

With the highly sensitive mood I was in at that awful time, the suggestion that I was wasting my life quite simply exploded my sense of being, self worth and purpose.

As I left dinner with Mike, I found myself asking what I had really wanted to do when I first picked up a guitar at the age of seventeen. I knew the answer immediately: to write, record and perform original music. I decided there and then I would write and record an album. That was easy the bit.

I was at once overwhelmed by a sense of determination, resolve and fizzing excitement about sinking my teeth into a project that had been gently beckoning to me all my life but which I had never allowed myself to take seriously. I now wonder why it took me so long to reach this point: laziness, procrastination? I don’t know, but the extreme feeling of carpe diem I felt after Chuck’s death seemed to leave me no choice.

The excitement of my decision was all the greater because I knew full well there were immense challenges ahead and that this enterprise not only represented a huge leap into the dark but would invite intense personal criticism of the kind that only artistic endeavours attract. Fortunately, I have never been afraid of making a fool of myself.

What I did not foresee was the powerful release of creative and emotional forces that songwriting and performing can entail. I wasn’t to know, but I had started on the most rewarding personal journey of my life.