Mark Crysell: I'll go a long way to keep an old friendship alive

As a young man from Taranaki, Mark Crysell lived a life of surfing and manual labour. That all changed when he hit London in the '80s and met a guy who matched his thirst for adventure and threw his perspective wide open.

I’m disguised as a cactus inside a glasshouse deep in the Devon countryside about four hours southwest of London. I’d love to describe my surroundings but there’s a sheet over my head. I’m also horrendously jetlagged.

It’s perfectly natural to ask why I'm in this position – I’ll get to that later.

I first met Alex in Maggie Thatcher’s London sometime during the early 80s. Me, working as a DHL courier driver straight out of Taranaki, hunkering down in a Kennington squat. He, tall, with foppish blond hair, an art student living in a council flat, who changed channels without leaving the couch by prodding a bamboo cane at the TV.

Lovely Jane, his girlfriend at the time and a fellow courier, introduced us. We hit it off straight away when we probably shouldn’t have.

Alex had gone to Marlborough College, one of England’s grand old boarding schools, he wore a vintage Rolex watch given to his grandfather by King George V at the end of World War I for developing a mechanism that allowed machine guns to be fired through propeller blades without damaging them.

My own grandfather was a watchmaker who lived in a Wanganui state house while I’d somehow managed to make it as far as the 7th form at New Plymouth’s Spotswood College before surfing got in the way of further education.

But we were in our early 20s, untethered but willing and able, up for adventures.

I couldn’t have been further from my Taranaki roots – I’d been a fencer and worked on the Think Big projects before I left for my OE. Meeting Alex totally changed the trajectory of that life.

By the time I got to England, the miners were striking, American warplanes flew from British bases to bomb Libya, a million people marched through London streets against nuclear weapons and we worried what the fallout from Chernobyl was doing to us.

Alex and his mates were part of the infamous Young British Artists (YBAs) movement shaking up the establishment by making art out of anything they could find and showing it wherever they wanted. Damian Hirst preserved dead things like cattle and sharks, Tracey Emin presented her own bed as art, our good mate Rachel cast the inside of an entire East London house in concrete and demolished it 80 days later.

I loved the way they looked at and lived in the world and the breadth and scale of their ambition. It felt like anything was possible, and that’s always irresistible. Alex once towed an entire Island the size of a football field from the Arctic to Weymouth and declared it a new nation called Nowhereisland.

I was in and out of London back then. Working for a bit so I could travel. Europe, Africa, the Middle East, America. And whenever I came back, Alex and I would pick up where we left off.

I close my eyes and remember parties ingesting whatever we could find, getting up the next day, playing tennis and then down the A23 to Brighton, hiring Hobie cat yachts and blasting past the piers out into the English Channel. Laughing like loons as we chased each other on bikes through deep piles of rusty autumn leaves in Cologne’s Volksgarten Park and an incredibly exotic party in an abandoned Barcelona mansion where everyone, apart from us, dressed like Boy George.

Alex was the best man when I married Barbara in her small village in Bavaria. We were late for the wedding ceremony because he’d forgotten the ring but he was there by my side as an interpreter jabbed me in the ribs three times to say Ja so the burgermeister could pronounce us mann und frau.

Alex was by then with the lovely Tania - New Zealanders might remember her work Virgin In a Condom which attracted Christian protestors when it went on show at Te Papa in 1998.

We were moving to a different stage in our lives, and by the time I returned to New Zealand I realised I’d changed. The breadth of my ambition had broadened, I was braver.

At the tender age of 29 I finally left manual labour behind and became a journalist. Committing to a career meant it could be years before Alex and I would see each other again.

But Alex, Tania and their young son, Frank, moved to Los Angles for a bit and that was close enough. I popped over and helped him make a book which combined two of his passions, climbing and LA’s mid-century architecture. We’d drive through LA’s chokey sprawl and the Hollywood Hills searching out architectural masterpieces, I’d set up the camera, Alex would quickly climb them, I’d take the photo and we’d shoot through before the armed response guards arrived.

In 2008, I headed back to London as TVNZ’s Europe Correspondent and we tried to pick up where we’d left off. Alex, Tania, and Frank were living in the Devon countryside still working as artists – London’s no place to bring up a young child.

We did our best to spend time together but being a correspondent means being dispatched anywhere at any time, night or day, weekday, or weekend, so it didn’t really work. Two years later I was back in Aotearoa, our beautiful, isolated, windswept, and sometimes sunbaked island nation at the bottom of the world.

Alex couldn’t make my second wedding to my darling Briar and I was unable to get to his to the enduringly lovely Tania because I’d finally become a dad to the delightful Edie Patrica Imogen Crysell (she has the best acronym).

We were always there for each other with phone calls and random WhatsApp messages with fragments of song lyrics which always ended in a plan for future adventures that never happened.

The truth is I missed him and as time went on, I really started to wonder if we’d ever see each other again.

Last year Alex texted to say he was turning 60 and was having a party to celebrate at his and Tania's home in an old mill house in Devon. Arghh, I replied, I’d love to come but we just can’t afford it.

But I talked to Briar and she said, go for it.

It took 33 hours and three flights to get there, and I was wretchedly jetlagged by the time I landed in Heathrow. The lovely Jane picked me up from the tube station. I spent the next couple of days in London trying to force my body into a different time zone and sending an occasional message to Alex, all of which can be summed up by: your party will be crap cos I won’t be there.

He had no idea. It was another four hours in Jane’s car, down the M3 before slotting into Devon’s narrow hedgerow-hemmed country lanes.

I’m pretty sure disguising me as a cactus was Jane’s idea. I snuck into Alex and Tania’s glasshouse while she went to get them from the house. One arm up, the other one down, a sheet over my head, my heart beating, I could hear Alex being brought up the path to view the new cactus, grumbling about his lunch getting cold.

The sheet is thrown off and... it’s me! “No f***ng way!” says Alex. And we hug and hug and hug, only stopping to pull back and look at each other because neither of us can believe this is happening.

The party was a banger, of course it was. So many of my old friends were there and they’ve all been living full and creative lives while I’ve been away. One of them has won a BAFTA, another has a successful career making children’s television. Rachel is a dame now; she was the first woman to win the prestigious Turner Prize for art.

They have grown children who look and act just like their mums and dads did way back in the 1980s.

As the speeches came to an end, I stood up at the table and told them all how meeting them all those years ago had changed me and I was so grateful.

We don’t always get the opportunity to tell the people we love what they mean to us and, as time goes by, that becomes more important.

I lost my job the other day. I’m not quite sure what comes next – it’s a weird time, but this morning I got a WhatsApp message from the other side of the world.

“Yo doley… how’s the sofa? Succumbed to daytime TV yet? Hope it’s not been too traumatic. Always a place for you in our glasshouse. Love you xx”

'This makes me happy' is a series about the things in life that bring us joy.