Way To Go Comrade!

My old friend Mike died last month….I admire and will I hope emulate his equanimity towards his end. Thanks to Sandra for the link to a moving deity-free memorial.

 

Mike McCrink 1948 2024

Mike McCrink did not invoke any deities when he called me in New York with his oncologist’s gloomy prognosis. While concerned to tie up loose ends for his survivors, he was almost as disturbed about the aftermath of the British and American elections as he was about his personal medical news. I was not surprised that his ironic laid back world-view coped well with dire scenarios, personal and political. 

Between tumors and Trump & Starmer, we did seem to be overdrawing on the Apocalypse account. For half a century we had helped each other navigate through some stormy political and marital and medical shoals and assisted each other in doting dad-hood, which he took very seriously. In one of his pithy pub aphorisms, he remarked that while people like us were rhetorically uncommitted to marriage, it said a lot for the institution that we tried it so often in the face of all the evidence against!

Both of us were beneficiaries of the recently born British welfare state and both naked out our existence to what increasingly seems like its faltering finish. Without illusions, both of us knew it was better than that went before and that it was deteriorating in front of us. We had shared over fifty years of politics together, from the time he turned up from London following the twin idols of Chairman Mao Tse Tung and Reg Birch to join us in the Liverpool branch of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist Leninist),  which wobbled between the latter’s autodidact Cockney philosophy and esoteric Chinese sloganeering.

Luckily we shared an irreverent sense of humour and relished indulging in Maoist concepts like “bombarding the headquarters,” and ”it is right to rebel,” while we often acted out like the Peoples’ Front of Judea (Splittist). The party actually did have some sound perceptions, but its Leninist founders increasingly frowned upon any disrespect for the headquarters, let alone bombardment or any actual rebellion. I remember Mike musing over a pint that the putative revolutionary party of the working class probably had fewer members and less influence than the Flat Earth Society! 

We were even more underwhelmed when Chairman Reg decided that Albania’s Enver Hoxha had the answers.  We never found what  the Albanian for “42” was, whether in Gheg or Tosk, but recognized Taurine excreta when we smelt it. We did truly and sincerely believe in emancipation of the working class, right up to now, but since we both came from the toiling masses ourselves, we had no great illusions about the outcome. We demonstrated and picketed about Apartheid, Vietnam, West German persecution of Leftists, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the so called Prevention of Terrorism laws, but we realized we were bearing witness, rather than shaking the world.

We had a PR strategy which leveraged our small numbers - to picket unpopular reactionary targets and get the local media to cover our protest. So we picketed the German and South African consulates. We discovered that both had recently closed because of the slump in shipping in the port of Liverpool. We discovered about the closure when the caretaker poked his nose through the door to find out what was happening. He broke this news just as we launched into our set-piece orations for Radio Merseyside - so we told him to shut up and get shut the door while we carried on!

We might occasionally have our head in the clouds, but Mike always had his feet firmly on the ground. Maybe his time as an altar boy inoculated him against dogma, Leninist or Christian, and our exposure to “Marxism -Leninism,” inoculated us against Leninism for when Trotskyist Militant Hattonistas escaped from the Life of Brian to try to impose Bolshevik discipline on Liverpool Labour Party. In the end, we discovered that the secret to avoiding disillusion is to avoid illusion. 

Perhaps one of his more idiosyncratic contributions was treating heroin users with acupuncture, which he had gone to China to study. I later suggested find out if he consider a potential retirement income from his (genuine) Chinese acupuncture qualifications but assumed that  since it was outside the NHS, it was not a secure income stream. I half-jokingly suggested veterinary acupuncture but he was not sure the customer base would see the point.

So he fell back into Further Education. We shared a predilection for history with an economic and social angle and I did urge him to try writing, but perhaps he predicted, accurately from my own experience, that the profession did not offer much in the way of fortune nor fame.

Always concerned about the excluded, he carried on teaching problem kids in Edinburgh after many contemporaries had cashed in their pensions. He was in harness right to the end - because he enjoyed it - and it was the right thing to do! 

It is 35 years since I moved to New York and Mike’s TransAtlantic companionship has been a constant support not least during my tediously frequent NDEs in the ICU at Columbia which in the end enable us to quip together about his approaching demise. It was heartbreaking but gratifying when he called a few days before the end, and told me it was his last call -to thank me for being a good friend.  I hope I face my exit with equal grace and equanimity.