Eulogy for Peter Marsh (1987–2025)

My best friend

Old art by Peter

For an English teacher who likes to talk a lot, I feel inarticulate with grief. This has not been easy for me to write. The dawn chorus felt thinner this morning. There is a pit in my stomach. I've always been given to navel-gazing; by contrast Peter, no matter how bad his mental health could get, was always looking to the skies for new ideas and schemes, for aliens, for the answers to the big questions of the universe. I was his best friend for 25 years. We balanced each other out. I don't know who I'm going to be without him, but right now I feel diminished, even knowing that I'll always carry part of him within me, teaching me to question accepted truths, to not care about being embarrassed or looking ridiculous, to always keep inquisitive and curious.

I already had a couple of kind, decent friends (like Luke) by the time I met Peter in Year 9, but I was bullied a lot in school and had learned to keep my head down. Peter was bullied more relentlessly and harshly than anyone I have ever met and yet he was constitutionally unable to keep his head down. He was, I believed – to quote Hunter S. Thompson – “too rare to live, too weird to die” and until I found Peter on the evening of Monday 23rd June there was a tiny illogical part of me that believed that somehow he would never die, that he would outsmart death every time, trickster-like, until he found a way to live forever or have his consciousness uploaded onto the internet or something equally impossible. Because Peter had been told time and time again by medical staff that he should be dead, but Peter was the most stubborn person I knew and hung onto life with a rare tenacity for someone who often found life scary, overwhelming and confusing – as I do. And because of that, Peter made me feel less scared. He taught me it is possible to find the beauty in life even when it feels like the world and your own mind are conspiring against you. He made the miraculous seem everyday and the everyday seem miraculous.

An album cover by Peter for a collection of his electronic dance and ambient music.

I could relate to you a thousand anecdotes. Peter Marsh was a machine for producing anecdotes. I remember one morning in sixth form when me, Tim, Alice and some other friends were standing around talking and then Peter rushed in, wild with enthusiasm. “I've been to the lizard dimension!” he pronounced. We asked him to explain what he meant. To explain, Peter borrowed from one of us a piece of paper and a pencil where he carefully sketched a three-dimensional cube. On each side of the cube he then proceeded to draw a lizard. The lizard dimension!

There was another time in the Douglas Baader where he insisted he has seen – even been pursued by – a UFO on his way through the woods, much to Rob and Alice's bemusement and scepticism. Often with Pete, I could never work out what he actually believed and what he just told me he believed in order to wind me up. At the end of the day, I think Peter wanted to believe in more. He enjoyed believing there was more to life than making your bed and washing up and food shopping and the daily grind. And this resolute and plucky idealism was, of course, facilitated by Gillian, his heroic and seemingly indefatigable mother who supported Peter and visited him every day when, as I know, he could be a difficult and, as I said, staggeringly stubborn human being.

He was also deeply, deeply kind-hearted and generous. He spent countless hours listening to me when I was stricken with obsessive worrying ruminations from my OCD. He always asked me what present I wanted for my birthday and Christmas and I honestly think he would have bought me anything I'd asked for, even if it was beyond his means and bank balance. He was open-minded and curious about my most pretentious recommendations of films for us to watch, songs to listen to or games to play. He indulged my ridiculous creative projects which he must have known would never get finished. He would always hold my hand or hug me if I needed. He was my best friend and I'll never know another like him.

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This is a Tidal playlist I put together of some of Peter’s favourite music.

In terms of Peter’s own music, you can listen to it here.

And, finally, here is the demo for a visual novel we were working on together.