My mate Dylan Wright

This is my mate Dylan. He's from a village in northern England, and an old girlfriend introduced him to me while I was living and working in Tokyo back in 2000. I broke up with the girl and we remained really, really good friends. He's a big guy, a black belt in kyokushin karate, an excellent rugby union player, fantastic scuba diver, has a graduate degree in teaching English to non-native speakers, and has experience living and working in Japan and Saudi Arabia.



Besides all of that, Dylan is a good friend. One of those guys you can always talk to about serious things without worrying about it getting out to other people, or feeling apprehensive. When I decided to become a fan of English soccer, he picked out a team for me: Liverpool FC, and that was definitely the right choice. He exhibits a kind of stoic whimsy; his voice has been compared to that of an English pirate. That's him in the bluish kilt on the right by the way.



He left Japan when I was there, in 2003, I think, and went back to England to see if he could get a job in London's famed Metro Police. The application process was to take a long time, so in the meantime he went to Saudi and taught English there. Needless to say, foreigners who were willing to work in Saudi at the time were a highly prized commodity, so it wasn't hard for Dylan to save some money and engage in incredible diving in the Red Sea at Jedda.

He came to my wedding in Texas back in the summer of 2005, and it really, really meant a lot to me to have him there, even though my marriage failed about 7 months later (this was an American rehearsal of our original wedding that had taken place two years earlier).

So I hear that he's now going to start working for the Metro Police in a small neighborhood called Hendon in northern London. I'm going to have to plan a trip to London just to see the tit on his head. Anyway, good mates are like gold, and Dylan is most definitely that.