Beautiful words. Well said.graeme wrote:Yesterday was a happy and sad occasion in roughly equal measures. I thought Mike, Clare, Susie and Iain all did so well, and their words and pictures really hit the mark. Such a difficult thing to do, I imagine. They all did him proud.
The legendary stories were in full flow throughout the day, and it’s great that we all have those wonderful, crazy moments to cherish and recall round the campfires for the rest of our days, and Tut will live on every time we say the words, “Do you remember when…?” Which we will. Often. For a long time to come.
But for me, it’s not the memorable mad moments I’m going to miss the most, but the the day-to-day stuff. The unremarkable but constant soundtrack to my life for the last… blimey… 17 years?! What a privilege it has been to be counted in the circulation of The Daily Tut; such a fine topical, editorial publication of remarkable frequency, distributed via email, forum and then WhatsApp as time moved on. It still hasn’t properly sunk in that there will never be another issue. A decade and a half of Tut’s hugely significant contribution to the daily ritual of talking utter bollocks with you lot has come to an end. That very sad realisation seems to be how the sense of loss is manifesting itself for me.
But of course I’m aware that it’s such a minor inconvenience compared with the sorrow his family are feeling right now, and my love and thoughts remain with them. I'm sure that for Verian 40 years of putting up with Tut is going to have been infinitely easier than one moment of not putting up with him.
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It’s no surprise to me any more that everyone, far and wide, seems to have heard of Tut. When I asked for the day off work to attend Tut's funeral, my boss knew who I was talking about, even though they never met, and I’ve never mentioned him at work. After a while, this sort of occurrence becomes normal. Everyone knows Tut.
But what always amazed me about him was how well Tut knew other people. Really knew them. You could meet him once, in a pit lane with 50 others, and the next time he saw you he’d greet you with that smile and recall your name, your partner’s name (and vital statistics!), which car was yours, and where and when he last saw you. I still remember the first time I met Tut, and it was of course utterly bewildering and terrifying, but it was nothing compared to the feeling of meeting him for the second time. A feeling of warmth, friendship, and inclusion. And he did that with everyone.
He could talk bollocks about cars all day, but his favourite topic, I reckon, was always people.
None more so than his family. I used to love his habit of (over-)sharing family news with us at the very earliest opportunity, motivated by pride and seemingly little else. I know this lack of boundaries would, on occasion, drive Verian up the wall, but to me it was a very genuine and endearing trait.
That sense of inclusion embodied by Tut became the spirit of Scottish Elises over the years, and I hope I can do my bit to keep that alive. I’ll never be as mad behind the wheel, or live a fraction of the incredible life he led, but I think making sure we get all together more often is the way I’d most like to #bemoretut
And if we ever organise a run in Tut’s memory, I hope it will be called “The Dash”
RIP Tut
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