I haven't been looking forward to writing this blog. I've known for some time that my best friend Soupy, known to Joeusers as johnsoup, will be leaving Korea. Knowing his dislike of presents, I promised to write a blog about him in lieu of a going away gift. There is the possibility, as I'm sure John will welcome, that this will lead me to write about my emotions; a very un-Barry thing to do.
We first met in September 2000 in my native Belfast. We were in the same Masters class, two of the few "locals" in a group of about 25. We got on right away, as we walked down the Lisburn Road together after our first class, talking about the Undertones. "I'm a clicker", Soupy says. "This is an audio-visual representation", he adds, clicking his fingers.
We had lots in common not least as Soupy once said "we're both tall, we're both scrawny, we both drink too much". The fact that we had both studied at Queen's before led many of our classmates to assume that we had been friends for years. Some people would only be disavowed of this notion the fifth or sixth time one of us told them "no, we've just met."
We got on famously for that year but soon we drifted apart. We were living in different countries and had very little contact. To quote a friend of ours "soupy is a HORRIBLE emailer". But by April of last year we were back in (roughly) the same place, working as English teachers in Seoul.
There had been a lot of water under the bridge since the last time we had seen each other regularly. When we first met, I was the confident, outgoing one while he was shy and reticent, reluctant (much to my amusement) to ask for the snooker cues from the barman in the Senior Common Room.
But in Korea things were quite different. It was Soupy's second stint in the country, my first, so naturally he was more at ease here. Furthermore, over the intervening years I had become, to quote a friend of ours "subdued".
My first few months in Korea were really tough. I hated (and still hate) my job and I had grown completely disenchanted with teaching. It wasn't much fun being me. Without Soupy and, by extension all the people I met through him, I would have been extremely unhappy in this country.
I am very grateful to him, not least for putting up with me duirng the early days when I was a miserable git. I have apologised many times to him since then for being so morose when I first got here, but he always refuses to accept my expressions of regret, probably just to piss me off.
But since August, morale in the O G San camp has improved considerably. Indeed I've been happier in the last six months that at any time since 2000-20001 (or 1940 as we call it).
But who is this guy that I've been gushing about? I suppose the first thing to say is that Soupy is ferociously intelligent, a bona fide intellectual with a razor-sharp mind. As some of you may have noticed, I'm no thicko myself, but Soups is way ahead of me. One of our favourite pastimes is arguing but for me this is a bittersweet experience because I frequently lose.
Though he is very intelligent, he is no intellectual snob. He's what I like to call an "all-rounder", someone with whom one can discuss all matters, both crucial and trivial, someone who can talk about politics and ideas but can also chat about women and football.
Some of my other friends are great when it comes to discussing the conflict in Palestine, but couldn't tell you who plays up front for Middlesboro these days. Other mates can talk about Arsene Wenger all day but have never heard of Mahmoud Abbas. With Soupy you get both. People like this are a rarity.
Just as he can talk about a range of topics, he has strong opinions about them all. This is what I call his "Tom Paulin syndrome", by which he is either completely enamoured with someting or else brutally dismissive of it. When Soupy talks about something he likes - be it a person, a film, a football match - his eyes light up like a small child as he describes the wonderment it brings.
But when he discusses something which has incurred his wrath, he spits out his disapproval, as if he bitterly resents that even a tiny fraction of his precious life has been spent contemplating such an abomination.
One thing which he always speaks of with wonderment is his job. Soupy loves teaching kids and, if I'm feeling indulgent, he can talk to me about it for hours. He stands in mark contrast to most of the rest of his peers.
Many ex-pat teachers think of their job in purely materialist terms. For them, the aim of the game is to extract the maximum amount of money for the minimum amount of effort. Thus children are not people in their own right, but rather occupational hazards, to be tolerated at best, or to be complained about (endlessly) at worst.
The fact that he loves his job is one of the reasons that Soupy enjoys life in this country so much. I've never seen him so happy as he's been in the past year. I've been impressed with how thoroughly he has stuck to his mantra "let the chips fall where they may". "I am zen" says Soupy as Yours Truly thinks about what to fret over next.
But for all that he's content here, he knows that he's been here too long, that Korea is too familiar now, too easy. It may be a nice rut that he's in, but it's still a rut. I've been telling him for a while now that he needs to move on to a new challenge. I'm quite sure that his decision to move to Argentina had absolutely nothing to do with my advice.
I'm gald that he's moving on, it'll be good for him, but I'm not so sure that it'll be good for me. There are a lot of things I'm going to miss after he gets on the plane on Saturday morning.
I'll miss the Soupy-isms with which he always peppers his conversations. "a lot of ifs, a lot of buts, a lot of what have yous", "to your credit", "that's thrown a Spaniard in the works." I've adopted these sayings myself but, like dancing at Polly's, it's a pale imitation.
I'll miss the insulting text messages. I'll miss drinking with Pete and him, when we take it in terms to gang up on each other. I'll miss all the deliberate riling. I'll miss the despairing shake of the head when I speak Korean and the "you're not in Taiwan now" when I speak Chinese.
But most of all I'll miss the arguments which must by necessity define the relationship between two opinionated Ulstermen. In the past year our disputes have encompassed everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. To quote just a tiny sample of the questions debated:
"Is it better for Protestants to hate other Protestants than to hate Catholics?"
"How many crap lines are there in American Beauty?"
"Who's the greatest footballer in the world?"
And of course the seminal "Did Moshe Dayan ever play cribbage?"
For those of you interested (and I can't for the life of me see why you should be), the answers are as follows:
"Yes, sort of."
"Two."
"Thierry Henry."
"No, of course he didn't, now stop interrupting this enthralling anecdote."
For the forseeable future though these debates will have to be carried out by phone or email at a distance of several thousand miles. There will be no more face-to-face conflict, no more angry finger-pointing or annoyed table-tapping.
Well fine then, fuck off to Argentina. Leave me here with second-rate schnooks from New Zealand and Coleraine.
I don't care. Ask me if I'm bothered.