On Monday morning I opened up my emails, and one quickly caught my eye, one of those emails with someone’s name the solitary occupant of the subject line. Deep inside I knew that emails like this can hold the worst possible news, but even so as I raced down the page, my brain was searching for a scenario that didn’t hold the message that I was starting to fear.
Sadly, the news in this email was shockingly bad, Simon Busuttil, my friend and colleague of over 30 years, had died suddenly and unexpectedly at the weekend.
Simon was based on the Turks and Caicos Islands [TCI] in the Caribbean, running a portfolio of RSPB conservation projects.
When we met in London last summer it was clear to me that he was loving life in TCI and full of plans for the future.
Simon and I first met in 1991 at Loch Garten, then got to know each other a few years later when he was RSPB Site Manager at Dungeness in Kent. There in the old low-ceilinged rooms of Boulderwall Farm we plotted a five-week expedition "Wings Over Kazakstan" through the Ili River delta in Kazakhstan. A journey that took us and four other English birders through a wetland twice the size of Kent, a boat trip 20km across a large lake in a couple of small aluminium boats with tiny outboards, where a sea monster was reputed to eat the bodies of drowned fishermen (that or it was big, deep and remote and there was no one around to find the bodies) and we “enjoyed" a very messy night in a campsite in the middle of nowhere when our guides tried (successfully) to get us drunk on homemade Vodka that smelt vaguely of bananas and we retaliated with a bottle of duty free Grouse.
Our RSPB careers took us to different parts of the UK, Simon to Aberdeen to manage the RSPB’s reserves in East Scotland and me to Norfolk. But we kept in touch, attended each other’s weddings, and just before my first son was born had a trip to Spain together where we marvelled at the vast flocks of wintering Cranes and spent a bitterly cold dawn listening to the squeaking door song of Dupont’s Lark.
Simon revelled in people and places, whether the shingle peninsular of Dungeness, the Montrose basin from where he’d tell me about the skeins of wild geese flying over his house in winter, or in more recent years the people and places of his adopted Caribbean home in the TCI.
When Simon moved with his family to the Caribbean our friendship played out on WhatsApp, only last week we exchanged messages and photos. And whenever he was in the UK, we’d meet up usually in Chinatown for a all you can eat buffet and afternoon talking squit in a London Boozer. When we met last summer, I remember how happy he was as a south London boy and lifelong Crystal Palace fan to have seen them lift the FA Cup earlier that year.
And so, to the shocking news contained in that email of his untimely death. Gone way to soon with so much left to do and a family to watch grow up. Whenever we met at some point the conversation always turned to our families, and Simon with that familiar glint in his eye would come alive as he updated me on Emily his wife, his two boys and daughter. I never had any doubt that he loved every moment of watching his boys become young men, becoming independent and holding their own in conversation with him, and the extra time he was looking forward to having with his daughter, his youngest child, as the boys left home.
And I know that if I’m going to miss my mate “Busty” hugely, that I can’t even begin to imagine the hole his passing will leave in his wife Emily and their children's lives.
Another one of the good guys gone.
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