Goodbye old mate. A tribute to Hovo

Some of you that follow this blog might know Hovo, most of you won’t. And that is a terrible shame. A teacher, a father, grandfather and husband. Lastly, my mate.

sunrise over Bathurst Island. Somewhere I think Jim would have loved to have seen.

I thought I would have more time before I would have to write something like this about Jim and I really wished I didn’t have to. But my old mate Jim Hovenden passed away on Father’s day this past Sunday. He was fighting Cancer for the last 18 months or so and at first we all had hoped it would be a successful fight but we soon found out it would be a prolonging of life more so then beating the disease.

I am saddened by his passing. Really set me back even though I knew it was coming. I was walking to work when I got the text informing me of his passing. I was speechless for about an hour. All I could do was think of Jim and his family. He was a family man and spoke of his kids and grandkids fondly even when the times were tough. He often posted pictures of them on his social media site and looked really happy.

I will share several memories I have of Jim, some are funny, some are indicative of the man he was. First thing you met when you got to know Jim was his sense of humour. Sometimes this humour would get him into trouble in the workplace. Sometimes his timing was impeccable and made the entire staffroom laugh. Other times his sense of humour betrayed his darker days when teaching wasn’t going so well for him, but he always managed to put a smile on my face when I was doing it tough or had a student that was testing my professional strengths.

His prowess at the card table can only be defined as idiotic at some points. He was always willing to go alone in euchre, even knowing the card he took up was terrible and the hand he held was completely opposite in suit to what that card was. Most of the time it failed miserably, but on the odd occasion it worked in spectacular fashion. And that is how I want to remember Jim, a risk taker, not afraid to go it alone and even though he faced setbacks and failures, he still took the risks.

This is in direct correlation to his teaching. Jim worked hard to engage kids. Some kids didn’t like the way he taught and he was passionate about history subjects. I believe a highlight of his was the History trip overseas a couple years ago. I was a welfare coordinator for this particularly robust cohort of year 9 students and Jim had them for English or History I can’t quite remember but I thought I would drop in and see how this one lesson was going to see if we could work on some things to get this class engaged. I hadn’t told Jim I was coming into the classroom, and when I knocked and asked if I could sit in on his lesson he was happy to have me sit up the back (quite happy because I was sitting between two of the more disruptive kids) The next 45 minutes I was impressed by what I saw.

Now I can’t tell you the poem he was teaching, I truly wish I could, however I do remember the lengths he went to, to get students to understand the structure and meaning of the poem. He played a couple of different youtube videos, some reading versions and also in song. I was discouraged to see students not paying attention to what was a really interesting lesson. Some students were rapt. I guess that is the nature of teaching sometimes, you aren’t going to please everyone, but Jim had tried, he went out and sourced multiple different ways to show his students how to read and understand the poem. It was a great lesson.

Another thing I will always remember about Jim is the end of year school beach day. I live in the Northern Territory at the moment but the mid north coast of NSW has some great beaches. South West Rocks is our annual beach day venue and the staff and students who attend really enjoy the day out at Trial Bay Gaol. Jim was BBQ master. It was his thing. Every year we got assigned jobs for the day and for the first few years I had toilet duty or roaming duty but then I got put on the BBQ with Jim, Laurie and a couple others to cook up lunch for the kids. Great memories of cooking fatty sausages and getting burnt by the oil. Jim always loved that day and the cooking. He took command and told jokes and made the day enjoyable for all.

The last thing I want to tell you about Hovo is the friendship I have with him. Wherever I have been in this world he would find a way to cheer me up if I was having a bad day. One way we did this together was play the “middle finger game”. This game was all about flipping each other off (giving them the bird), and we took it to the extremes. I would leave my spot at the lunch table to sit at my desk and wait for him to come down the ramp into the staff room and sit there with my finger up waiting for him to see me.

On other occasions he would lean over the desk hutch and it would be a while before I would look up and just see his hand, middle finger extended in salute. Maybe not the most professional of games, but it was a game that we enjoyed. We used it in a way to make each other feel better about a hard day. I am going to miss looking up and see a grinning Hovo with his finger up at me knowing he got me. It will be a thing I look for when I return to St. Paul’s College in 2018. It will be also something tinged with sadness each time I look at where he used to sit.

I am going to miss him more than I care to say. He knew the town I grew up in as he had taught there and we had common love of woodwork and boats and fishing. In the later stages of his life, he knew I had bought a boat and gave me shit for the engine on the back of it. All in jest of course. I really wish I could have taken him fishing up here in the Territory. I just know he would have been giving me shit about something and raising his finger in an effort to get a smile out of me.

To Jim, I am going to miss you mate. I hope you are sitting up there with Laurie and Trish having a cold beer telling stories and jokes and making sure the big guy upstairs gets his fair share of the middle finger game. I am thinking of you and your family at this very hard time I hope they can find comfort in knowing you are now at peace.

Love you my brother and will never forget you.
Brad.