Hero spotting

A couple of weks ago I saw my good friend Jeremy, who lives in Highgate in London.
'Remember when we got chatting with that guy in the pub, and he used to be in the music business?' he said.
I thought back a few months. Jeremy and I both have pasts on the fringes - the very fringes - of the music business, so we felt fairly self-congratulatory about spotting a fellow musician in his local pub. Like we'd identified one of our own kind with our muso-dars. We felt compadre-ship with him, and had no doubt he shared this. Here's a couple of chaps who understand me, he must have thought.
'Oh yeah,' I said.
'Know who it was?'
'No - should I?'
'It was Ray Davis.'

One dumbstruck pause later I burst into hysterical laughter. We'd exchanged banter with the frontman of the Kinks, Sixties icon, super-fine songwriter, general legend and arguably the man who invented heavy rock. And that exchange had essentially been: 'Hey, you look like you're a musician.' 'Yeah, I used to be in the biz.'

Ray Davis isn't the only hero who's come into my life unrecognised though. Michael Lister, the man who raised me, falls into that category too. I've been doing something about getting closer to him recently, revising my views of him and his role in my childhood. One thing strikes me though. I've never thought of him as my hero, and it hasn't occured to me to ask myself - what if he is? What sort of hero is he? What has he inspired in me?

Let's be clear - I didn't speak to him for 13 years, there's plenty of re-bonding to do. It seems like these might be useful questions to look at as we do it. But it strikes me that even if we'd never fallen out of communication, if that rift had never happened, I could very well have still never noticed that hero on my doorstep.