This was written for Milo by Sarah and Milo’s friend, Ruth King.

I will miss Milo very much. I will miss his curiosity, which meant he always had something new and interesting to talk about every time you saw him. I will miss his quiet moral sense, which meant both that you could never quite predict what his view or opinion of a situation or topic would be (not one to toe the party line!), and that I always took his views very seriously. I will miss his slight smile as he tried to say funny things with a straight face, his attempts to be less competitive at board games to not hurt others’ feelings, and lots of other small things which I’ll realise when, in the course of everyday life, I think, “Milo would have said/thought/done it this way.”

Especially I suppose because this is how I most knew him, I’ll miss how Milo was in a group of friends. He could always be depended on to hold together a group of very different people. I’ll miss the sharp social awareness which led him to turn conversations round to ones that can include everyone. He had a real (and rare) gift for knowing which social usages are important to make people feel comfortable, and which are useless or harmful traditional rubbish. The best example of this is at our wedding, when the ceilidh caller asked for a volunteer to demonstrate the first dance and Milo stepped forward. In one simple action, he made the day better for everyone (in that he allowed everyone to learn the dance), included people who might otherwise have felt excluded (i.e. those who wanted to dance with someone of the same gender) and showed up in a lighthearted way some of the gender issues with dancing. I’ll always be grateful to him for doing this, though he probably didn’t even think twice about it. That’s just who he was.

All this means thinking about Milo makes me smile because I have such happy memories of times with him. Playing crazy golf in the sunshine in Swanage, sitting round the table laughing and eating in Rotherhithe, board games in Dulwich… times spent with Milo were always good times. It is beyond obvious that he will leave a huge hole when we meet as a group again. I can safely say that I will never spend New Year without thinking of Milo. He was, and always will be, very valued and very missed.

Gallery