| Pete Fenelon |
[Oct. 19th, 2008|05:15 pm]
nicholas
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Late one evening about fifteen or sixteen years ago, while I was an undergraduate at York, I found myself sat at a terminal in Goodricke library. I don't remember exactly what I was doing - either emailing or reading Jorvick most likely, but I do remember that at some point the door slammed open and an orange-bearded, bespectacled, portly gentleman wearing a black leather jacket cheerfully stamped in, sat down at another terminal on the back row, and started hammering away at the keys. After a minute or so he started grumbling about 'maggot-boxes'. Pretty quickly I deduced that this must be Pete Fenelon, one of the only other people on Jorvick who posted under their own name rather than a pseudonym of some sort.
Over the intervening years, Pete ( blue_condition) introduced me to some splendid music (including Half Man Half Biscuit, who subsequently became one of my favourite bands), some even more splendid people and some fascinating books and films. His knowledge of the restaurants (particularly those which specialised in curry) of York and its environs was legendarily encyclopaedic, and in the past few years he demonstrated a strong talent for photography. Had I been in any way interested in alcohol or motor-racing, my horizons would have been similarly expanded by his knowledge of whisky, beer and Formula 1. He definitely had a sense for the finer things in life.
I was rather hoping and expecting that this was all going to continue for several more decades, and it has come as a tremendous shock to learn that this won't now be the case.
He was a splendidly funny and intelligent man. His articles on the Paranoid Programming Language and the various types of programmers found in academia, as well as his critical analyses of 1970s children's television programmes (such as Bagpuss, Bod and Scooby Doo) make me laugh as much now as when I originally read them in the early 1990s. His handy questionnaire provided an entertaining guide to the modern British social class system long before the word 'chav' had been coined, much less passed into popular use.
He had a reputation for being a grumpy old sod, but to those of us who got to know him, either in person or online, I think it was pretty obvious that the gruffness and cynicism was only on the surface - underneath he was a thoroughly nice bloke, on whom you could completely rely in times of need. Which isn't to say that he suffered fools gladly (although as Eddie Izzard has remarked, who does?). On one occasion, an annoyingly evangelical poster to Jorvick had just made another of his regular, clumsy and unwelcome attempts to convert the masses by inviting them along to that evening's Christian Union meeting to discuss theology and faith over a subsidised toasted sandwich. Pete's one-sentence put-down "There are some depths to which even I will not stoop in search of a 30p cheese toastie, and consorting with god-botherers is one of them" was, I believe, quoted in at least one colleague's usenet and email signature block for some time afterwards. On another evening in Goodricke library, he showed me an entertainingly blunt email message he was about to send to a user on a computer system he helped administer: "Currently /home is 99% full. Is there some pressing academic need for you to store 80 megabytes of Cindy Crawford pictures in your home directory?" (at the time, 80MB was a non-negligible proportion of the available storage space).
As others have noted, Pete didn't believe in an afterlife, but on the offchance that he's wrong, I daresay he's sipping the angel's share of a glass of expensive whisky while watching Ayrton Senna racing Donald Campbell. At the moment, though, I can't quite believe he's not still down here with us. He was a splendid chap and I for one will miss him terribly. I'll try to make it up to York on Friday, so hopefully I'll see some of you there. |
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