Derek Love
8/12/1946 – 19/3/2019
Photo by Bob Hsiung
Written for Derek’s funeral
“I started to write this, at 35000 feet. The white clouds made a perfect horizon against a pure azure. The cloudscape was a field so perfect that it seemed we were suspended in time and might never return to earth.
I knew Derek for some 25 years, working with him on committees, like the British Association of Group Psychotherapists, in the 1990’s. We encountered each other at Westminster Pastoral Foundation, when we both worked there, and taught together at Croydon College. Later we were part of a quartet, who organised a quarterly meeting for fellow Group Analysts, where I would often enjoy meeting his youngest daughter, our helper, Olivia. How delighted Derek always was to introduce her into our part of his world.
Derek operated from a robust sense of the sort of open encounter he wanted to have with others. He could be playful and light-hearted, but he was serious, indeed passionate, about his beliefs and the values to which he was committed. He was deeply anti-elitist, dismissive of pomposity and self-aggrandisement, whilst also being ready to acknowledge and celebrate others’ achievements. He would not let an issue of principle go unargued, but he wasn’t driven by envy or personal ambition. I experienced him as an extremely loyal person.
But Derek could suddenly withdraw and become deeply inaccessible and uncommunicative – a dark cloud would envelope him from which he was unable to emerge. On one occasion, at least, I found myself unable to meet the need, which he presented me with. This was a very painful experience for both of us.
My friendship with Derek was rooted in occasions, when he would ring me up to announce that he had a spare ticket to see a musician, whose merit he assumed I would know, but whom I often would not have heard of. If it was at all possible, I would always go, because Derek had a wonderful, eclectic musical taste and I would know that I was in for a treat. He often proselytised for the music he loved, or had just discovered – giving cd’s to his friends, to spread the word.
My first social encounter with Derek was when he invited me to join a small group of his friends, in his flat in southeast London. The task which he invited us to join with him was to spend the evening listening to the whole Blonde on Blonde album so as to develop our own group commentary on Dylan’s masterpiece. A very Derek Lovely occasion, where, in the end, we were finally defeated by the sheer length of Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowland. Dylan was always a point of reference for Derek; since learning of his death, and sometimes experiencing waves of guilt, I have walked past the opening of Positively 4th Street.
It’s extremely hard to believe that we won’t see or hear Derek, again – that we won’t wait with a sense of expectation, as he struggles to express some abstract observation, nor share with him his pained amusement at the endless struggle to understand and be understood.”
David Glyn