At the raw bar with Cowpey

It is ten years ago this year that Chris and I travelled to LA for our dream gig. We had a whole week of working together on a client who had taken us to NYC and Atlanta many times. But this was different. This was California. This was sunshine and beaches and boulevards, promenades, New World wines and seafood. Oh. And work.

We were staying at the Casa del Mar hotel. Every morning we were picked up by limo and taken to the client’s offices. All we had to do was stand outside the hotel and get in the car. And get out at the other end. For five days we worked with the leadership team on their business development strategy – prospecting, pitching, growing existing clients, client clinics and setting up the Way to Win system. I flounced about around the flip charts, Cowpey did all the intellectual heavy lifting and writing up of what we agreed at the end of every day. He was always the consummate pro. Thorough. Logically tough. No detail escaped his attention. The relaxed vibe of the place meant we were usually done by 6pm, which gave us five free nights. Cowpey would always need to go to his room for a smoke (have you tried smoking in California?), to call Jane and to write up the notes from the day and email them to the client. He was always done by 7.30pm. The night was ours.

We would meet up in the hotel bar. Of course. A horse shoe affair, with TV screens at various vantage points on which played an unending stream of baseball – it was the season. One night, when I was fed up with watching indecipherable innings without understanding a word of the commentary, Chris painstakingly explained the rules to me. I doubt I could regurgitate them now but then they were crystal clear. He was good at making the complicated seem simple and at making the convoluted straightforward. As many clients and colleagues would attest. It was his gift. We followed our preliminary beers with a stroll. The stroll always led to the same door. Via the boardwalk and the pretty people, we unCalifornians ambled – Chris, rumpled, ash splattered, ebullient. Me, un-chiseled, pale, looking forward to another round.

On our second night we happened upon a raw bar. One of those fantastic, welcoming, informal seafood places right on the foreshore. The guy welcomed us at the door and had us at ‘hello’. He got we were English and talked us through the menu. We had a beer in our hands before we even sat down. It was the shank of the day and the orange glow of Pacific coast sunlight bathed everything in a moment of divine content. The menu included chowder, steamers, mussels, clams, cracked crab and oysters. Oysters. Oysters and a bottle of white. Then another. We drank a prodigious amount, but it never felt like too much with Chris. Not that night. Or the subsequent three. And in the morning, we waited for the car to pick us up. Undamaged but stored with the sunlight, wine and conversation from the night before.

It was a glorious time spent with one of my favourite people ever.

Cowpey. My but he was good company. I loved him – his irascibility, his generosity, his intellect, his compassion. His urge for fun. Ed Docx, the author and one time account man at our old advertising agency, once said of Cowpey that he was ‘the only man you could catch a heart attack from’. It was the best description of a man who was as intense and as frenetic as a double espresso. He was always a powder keg of brains only seconds away from combustion. Those who worked late into the smoking fuelled night with him, as he furiously scribbled pitch charts, could almost feel the intellectual energy coursing through his bloodstream but hardening their arteries. He was dangerous to be around. And, when in full verbal flight, he was marvellous to behold, too.

I vaguely remember the day times and the work we did. But the velvet evenings walking, talking, laughing, eating, drinking and, well, just sitting in ease together, they were time out and time away from all cares. Chris and I travelled mile after air mile together in our work for Caffeine. We shared shisha pipes by the Bosphorus on the day Chris spotted 17 briefs hidden in the speech we had heard from the head of Unilever when no one else in the audience had spotted one.

We spent too many but not enough well lubricated evenings at Airedale Avenue and at Alverne Hay in my Penzance home. We flew to Hong Kong and straight off the plane to a party. He gave a tour de force of a presentation at the Entrepreneurs Club there the next day and again in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. We stood in front of Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow in a photo taken by my future wife (we met on that day). We burnt midnight Chardonnay at the Chocolate Factory on 11th avenue working on some of the biggest pitches in our careers.

We were in the lobby of the Atlanta hotel at 0500 hours to clap the Ogilvy team out of the door on their way to make the pitch for UPS. We wept with laughter at the hopeless decisions we had made about the business in the barcat the Soho Grand. We blew along the gale storm promenade of Penzance many times and were crestfallen when we challenged the cafe owner on Praa Sands to guess what work we did and he guessed ‘you be advertising types’ first go (was it the clothes?). We drank our way through board meetings in Bath, Exeter, York, Plymouth, New York. And through it all, Chris was always the voice of reason, of caution, often of Cassandra. And Cassandra, as we remember, was always right.

I was always Sergeant Lewis to Chris’ Inspector Morse. Luckily, I have a box set of memories. But when Morse went to LA, it was a particularly special episode. Glass in hand, the day’s work done, discoursing on a favourite topic, he was the most alive of men. Like the sun that was our backdrop on those LA evenings, he could be fiercely bright. But in his setting, he was even magnificent – gentle and kind and friend to all.