Love:
According to literature, there are seven types of love.
Love shared is not love divided. It is love multiplied.
It was shortly after starting at Rocket Factory, that Sam and James had taken me [Kate] to The Dog [5k run] as it was nicknamed. They were intermittent attendees due to her study and work. During the pre-prizegiving drinks, Sam and James introduced me to the crowd, including Tom whom they casually knew. He was there with his girlfriend Kelly. Sam introduced me as her new flatmate and friend and that I had come back to work at RF.
Tom had asked me what I was doing there. I told him that I was on propulsion, and he surprised me by replying, "1,2 or kick?" [stages].
I had never been asked this before and replied, "Mostly First so far." He actually showed genuine interest. But Kelly was looking sour at our interaction, despite James and Sam trying to engage her. However, there was something in my mind that I had met Tom before.
Later that night, I said to Sam that Tom looked vaguely familiar. She agreed but had no idea why either.
Over the next few months at The Dog, Sam, James, and I would chat to Tom and Kelly, she would always be sour when the three of us talked to him despite us trying to engage her in conversation.
After they had split, we talked to Tom alone. Invariably, we would get the mysterious 'hit' about Tom but could never isolate the reason.
It was when we were scrolling through our uni photos that it hit us: we had seen Tom at our classmate Jo's funeral. Jo had died suddenly which had hit us hard. He was delivering the eulogy for his fiancé and while he projected strength and compassion, we could see his life had been rent asunder.
It was near this time that Sam and James' relationship had fizzed out.
Occasionally we would see Tom at The Dog and exchange pleasantries. But the implicit rule there was that the only number you asked for was the one that was called out at the finish line. Tom was his usual pleasant self invariably chatting to Sam and I as we tended to mingle together, enquiring how my work was and taking an interest in my answers due to his family history in the sector. Occasionally when he was being particularly jocular, we would see a quick flash of something which we accepted as just him as we all had a side, and we had a possible cause for his rapid descent then ascent.
In our souls, there is a shelf labelled Love. Each person's shelf is a different size and stacked with different vessels. Each vessel contains a unique recipe.
In Tom's soul, the Love shelf was broad and stacked with a wide variety of labelled vessels. The vessel labelled Jo was in a corner, but still prominent. It was a vessel that he had hoped would continue to grow and be filled with an ever-richer liquid until his soul ended. But the filler tap had been suddenly wrenched away and the lid slammed shut. It had a lid that would sometimes let seep when Tom was in a particularly happy mood his side as we called it.
There used to be a small, partially filled bottle labelled Kelly. Kelly had been envious of the Jo bottle still prominent on the shelf and the affect of its seepage on Tom when his mood was at its sweetest. She had wanted the love contained in it to be transferred to her bottle and didn't understand that her bottle was being filled with fresh, new, additional love. This had caused her bottle (the relationship) to turn bitter, smash to the floor and then everything heads down the drain. Kelly did not understand about Love Multiplication.
The Jo bottle also existed on our shelves, albeit a smaller and with a simpler, gentle flavour.
Sadly, the bottle labelled Tom on Kelly's shelf was still there, rattling, the contents rancid and eating away at her shelf.
The bottle labelled Sam on his shelf had started off, like the one labelled Kate, as a small, gentle bottle that was infrequently seen but containing a simple, pleasant liquid that got infrequently topped with drips of new, similar liquid. But after they met on the run, the Sam bottle had transmuted into an amorphous, growing vessel that was rapidly being filled by a sweet and increasingly richly flavoured liquid, as was the Tom bottle on Sam's shelf.
Though, at the same time, the Jo bottle would sometimes seep during his happiest times causing his quick darkness. Sam knew that she was being loved deeper and wider in addition to his love for Jo, so she would open her Jo bottle and let her bottle's contents (memories) waft to Tom, lifting him back into happiness, thus enriching the contents of hers and Tom's bottles at the same time.
Tom's and my bottles were naturally smaller and contained the recipe of fun cousins, occasionally scented with a nip of Jo if I caught Tom's funk before Sam could.
For Tom, the Love shelf manifested itself in many physical forms.
His house was interesting and reflected his complexity. For a single guy's house, it wasn't all man. There were a few teddies dotted around that were gifts from people. The walls had a variety of paintings including two one SqM storm paintings that were gifts from his first flatmate.
H2 was only a year old and had certain features that elsewhere would be considered naff or plain nasty elsewhere but worked here. The main one was a mostly blue but white topped fence with the bright orange pergola. Tom explained that when he and Jo bought H1, it had a vile, dark green fence and bare, decaying pergola. They had gone to the paint wholesaler to get some remnants and bought the blue and white, but they had seen the orange on the really remnant shelf and decided to use it on the pergola.
Sam and I knew this was a Jo thing: she was the one we went to if we needed colour advice. Sadly, Kelly had hated it at H1 and would try to convince him to repaint. This would send Tom down his Jo hole again. We would laugh at the Jo influences that he had carried over to H2: they were there because they had worked at H1, and he knew they would work well at H2.
The other was that the whole deck and spa area had strings of fairy lights strung over in addition to the main spots. Again, really tacky elsewhere, but at night, they created a gentle dispersed glow. Sam and I had discovered that the gentle glow illuminated our pussy light and soon after the fairy lights were on, it was time for our partners to start blocking our lights.
His garden was the most obvious manifestation of Love. The beds were planted with lilies, dahlias and others backgrounded against the bright fence that lit up your soul. The veg patch was there to stimulate the soul via the stomach as he grew for freshness or rarity for his cooking as it supplied much of the basic ingredients that added the magic to even such a basic dish as salad.
For everyone, including Sam and I, Tom's Love really manifested itself in his cooking. To see Tom in his kitchen was masterful, like watching Simon Rattle in front of the Berliner Philharmonika, except our Maestro was a crop Brunet.
Tom was a City Boy as we needled him. He playfully objected to this binary definition, and he would use the third term: County Boy, for he was born into the urban part of the county, but he was a Rural Boy of heart.
While City Boy couldn't tell the difference between a Merino and a Romney, being with him in the supermarket's fruit and veg section was an education initially for this pair of Country Girls. "Weak, weedy and flaccid," were epithets he uttered as we put an Iceberg lettuce or a bag of Red Delicious in the trolley, which were quickly returned to the shelf. "Crunchy, holds flavour" uttered when a Cos or Braeburn was the correct pick. He knew the correct usage of a Granny Smith vs a Fiesta was: we just thought they were apples!!
For us, our rural knowledge was things with legs, his was things that had roots on. This was setting up an interesting mix, I thought.
These Country Girls were getting an education from this City Boy. In many ways.
Tom loved to cook. For him it was as natural as breathing. You never saw a supermarket sliced loaf, nor bought preserves on his table. While he wasn't a health nut, he ate what he liked and what he liked was good, clean flavours. If you can read the ingredients list without googling what they mean, it's probably good was his motto. He just knew how to make things sweet enough and still leave enough acidity for bite. Except for Sam as he was really sweet on her and she likewise, but this was a deep, rich, enriching sweetness.
Cooking encapsulated his whole life, from being in the kitchen as a young boy watching, then helping his mother and maternal grandmother cook and bake, to then being allowed to help to finally being set loose solo in their kitchens. To being outside with his family in the fields on the moors or near the river either just walking or collecting berries to freeze and then to cook during fallow times. It was imbued with his memories of travel, movies, and life in general.