As the title says, Matt is my mate. Until recently we worked together for the same airline, but he has gone off to pastures new in China. He couldn’t take the punishing rosters and the contempt in which we pilots are, or have been held by the senior management, so he’s going somewhere where managerial contempt or at least indifference, is a given, but at least they pay well enough to mitigate it.

Matt was once an aircraft apprentice at Qantas, and you would be hard pressed to find someone more adept than he with a lathe or C and C machine. He is a wizard with tools and machines and quite how he was lured away from a potentially lucrative career in engineering to fly for a living, is beyond me. He can pick up a dull, dry company operations manual and assimilate its soporific contents in a jiffy, later recalling numerous pertinent but (apparently insignificant) details as if he had just read them.

In his time he has built and raced dragsters into which he had shoe horned jet engines, raced go-karts at semi professional level and built and flown remote control jet powered model aircraft. If Matt was a surgeon, he’d have your leg off in a jiffy and you’d barely notice it, instead thanking him in amazement for such a neat job.  Being Strine, he was born to swim, and he knows a thing or two about catching fish as well. He is typically male Australian, or Strine, and will, if liberally plied with gin and tonic or Jack Daniels and Coke, regale you for hours with all the reasons why Arsetrailer, and Strines, are respectively, the best place in the world, and the best people.

As friends go, he is a diamond geezer. Not that he and I were forever in each other’s company; Matt had many more other friends than I did, but he could be surprisingly perceptive for someone who, outwardly at least, has an unforgiving macho disposition. Both of us endured heart rending, destructive marriage break ups within the space of a year, and in our own ways, gave much needed support and sometimes unwelcome but necessary criticism.

His departure has made me think a bit about friendship; what it is and how it evolves.