Mr G

Mr G- Ty Goddard, 44, is my closest friend.

The photo (left) doesn't really capture his "essence". He's a tall bloke with a "big" personality. A lover of good wine, beer, food and company. He's a charasmatic person with brilliant verbal communication skills. Sometimes he almost sells me his view that the New Labour Gov't is the best thing to happen to Britain in the post war period.

When you see these so called "New Labour" socialists (although I guess they admit to NOT being the S word knowdays) privatising everything that moves, using PFI with no regard to the future, attacking public sector workers terms, conditions, pay, two pointless and unwinnable wars etc it does make you lose heart. Even worse is the Tories now draping themselves in the humanist mantel. Why one Tory MP even said that PCS should go on strike to defend public services... The world turned upside down! Sorry, went off at a tangent just then, not like me at all!

Anyhow I've known Ty since I was 22... a long time now! We were both Student Union Sabbatical Officers - and that's how we met. I was President at Brighton Polytechnic and Ty was Communications Officer at Sussex University. Those were exciting times. Organising local demos against the Fowler Review and going on national demos. Getting our own Student nightclub- the Gloucester. Ty and I got arrested outside the South African Embassy on an NUS Anti apartheid march that year!

When my first daughter was still born, Ty stepped in to officiate and speak the words I'd written. Probably the first and only time he has let me put words in his mouth!!! And on my Wedding Day, when I'd been really crap and somehow ended up with two Best men, it was Ty that diplomatically sorted out, what could have been, a disaster.

For a number of years - probably more than a decade, he almost disappeared from view, working as a Labour Councillor in Lambeth. But the point is, when I needed his support he was always there. What more can you ask from a best friend?

Now he's back in Brighton and although he works too hard in my opinion, I get to hang out with him pretty regularly. Even when Kaz and I turn up almost unannounced he is welcoming and gets excited like a big kid. Me, I'm more acerbic, and generally as welcoming as a guard at Abu Gharib. So I'm often left wondering why we're such good mates.

He's not without faults, and I'm not blind to them, but at the end of the day his positive qualities far outweigh his negative ones...