Phil was a friend of mine. We met in 2012 or so, and I spent many afternoons recording his story, and that of his wife Gaby. It was a beautiful time. He was probably in his early 70s then, a broad, slightly forbidding man who shook hands like somebody who’d been on the tools all his life; he'd say hello, arch an eyebrow at you grimly, a pause as if sizing you up, then a smile and he’d invite you in. He was a poet, a house-builder, a dramatist, a San Francisco beatnik in the 60s; a sufi mystic, a lover of baseball and a slug of Baileys in his morning coffee, and a frequenter of Seattle’s great literary boozer The Blue Moon Tavern in its high days; a student of Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington, a skier and football player; and a drinker of a couple of bottles of Pilsner Urquell in the early afternoons as we would sit talking. He described his life as a mystery in which he somehow managed to remain upright with no visible means of support. And told me he didn’t fear death, he was curious to move onto the next stage of the journey and find out what was up ahead, round the bend.

I last saw Phil in 2022, about six months before he died. I visited in him his retirement home. He’d had his beard shaved off and didn’t look like himself. He was lying in a bed with the TV on just above his head, and when I told him I was there, he called out to his first wife, then already gone, ‘Noni, Dominic’s here.’