This website is dedicated to Ben Horsman and Kathryn Berg, who both died late on the night of Sunday 15th August 2004, in a tragic car accident.
Ben was one of my best friends. He was born exactly a year to the day earlier than me, in July of 1976. He attended Hinchingbrooke Secondary School in Huntingdon and went on to become an honours graduate in Geology from Durham University. Ben had a passion for rocks and bits of stone, which provided me with an endless source of joke making. Yet, he had been known to sometimes travel great distances just to find that special rock for that special person. He once went on holiday with a friend to Stornoway and insisted on spending hours in the pouring rain looking for a particular rock for his girlfriend, Kat. His friend quite rightly complained, but Ben could even make rocks have special meaning for people.
While Ben was at Durham University, he and I programmed an internet chat room, which touched the lives of hundreds of people from all over the world, who regularly talked to each other on it, made friends, and even got married. Indeed, it was working together on this chat room that initially made us become close friends back in 1996.
Ben was a brilliant cook. Cooking was a passion we both shared. However his baking sometimes left something to be desired. Luckily, his girlfriend Kat, was fantastic at baking. Almost every time Ben and I met, he would create some new culinary experience for me. I especially remember Ben's Creamy Chicken Dish and a world famous Chicken Satay. On one occasion, I was helping him make his Chickan Satay dish. Among the ingredients for the sauce was a whole king size jar of peanut butter, several tablespoons of toasted sesame oil, honey, brown sugar, and a large quantity of sweet chilli sauce. Dieters beware!
Although Ben loved rocks and Durham, he had always wanted to live in Scotland. He moved to Dundee where he joined me at Abertay University and obtained a Post Graduate qualification in Computing. Ben then became employed by Sapphire Manufacturing Systems in Dundee's Technology Park, where he became their Product Manager.
For a lot of people, this would have been enough, but not for Ben. Ben was so much more than this.
Perhaps Ben never got fat from eating his Chicken Satay dish, because of his love of sport and martial arts. He studied Karate, Kendo, Fencing, Capoeira, Aikido, and I myself taught him the art of sword fighting. We would often go to a clearing in one of the woods in Dundee, to practice our sword fighting, producing curious glances from the public, and even amassing audiences of some size on occasion. Ben was frequently eager to display his skills in Capoeira, a martial art based on traditional African dances, and indeed there are several funny stories of Ben doing Capoeira style cartwheels and strange twirling dances in cinema car parks and outside of Dundee Central Library.
Ben loved competition. We spent many a night fighting each other in various computer games and we often played golf, pool, badminton, poker and Fluxx together. No matter what we competed in, Ben nearly always won. Ben winning at poker was especially annoying, as the money I lost to Ben soon added up. However, Ben's hospitality, food, and friendship always made me eagerly look forward to the next session, even if was sure to lose even more money to him. Perhaps this is why Ben frequently called me a muppet.
Ben and I learned to play Golf together. A couple of weeks before the car crash, we were at the Pitch and Putt golf course at Forfar. Ben was explaining to me that when we become good at golf, we would be able to tee off and land the ball right in the middle of the green on small golf courses such as these. I myself was optimistically hoping to get there in around 3 or 4 goes. Without hesitation, Ben teed off. Incredibly, the ball landed just short of the green, bounced, and came to halt just inches away from the flag. "YA WEE DANCER!", Ben exclaimed in his Scottish tongue. Ben tended to win at golf too.
Ben also loved science fiction. Every week, Ben and I would meet up to watch the latest episode of Star Trek, or Babylon 5. Ben had a motto that was loosely based on an episode of Babylon 5 called "The Coming of Shadows". It reads: "Enjoy every moment while it lasts, for all things end. If you love, love without reservation. If you fight, fight without fear.". Anyone who knew Ben well will tell you he truly lived by this motto.
Some people say that Ben was more Scottish than some Scottish people. He loved the Scottish culture, Whisky, and of course, Scottish women – which he insisted have the best backs of all. Having said this, Ben was extremely picky when it came to choosing girlfriends. When he recently met Kat, however, they fitted into each other's lives perfectly, as if they were the both the missing piece from each other's jigsaw. My weekly Ben science fiction night became Ben and Kat night. Although they had only been together a short time, they were well and truly in love. Anyone who saw Ben or Kat together will tell you that both of them had simply glowed with happiness since the day they met each other.
Kat recently spent a lot of time and effort helping Ben to research his family history, and she succeeded in finding him his clan's Graham tartan, which is shown as the background on this page. He promptly spent hours searching Scotland for a Graham kilt, which he eventually found and wore at the first opportunity to a friend's wedding. Kat loved Ben's kilt so much that she ordered a mini-kilt, of the same tartan, for herself. Even though Kat ordered it for herself, I'm sure it would have been more for Ben's pleasure. It was a mini-kilt, after all. It's a tragic shame that so many of the small things in life, such as mini-kilts, Ben and Kat never got to experience with each other.
Ben rarely had any regrets. Another motto that Ben loved comes from one of his favourite films, City of Angels. It reads: "I would rather have had one breathe of her hair, one kiss from her mouth, one touch of her hand than to live an eternity without it. ONE."
Ben was truly a wonderful person, who touched the lives of hundreds of people. He once told me that when he eventually dies, he would rather people celebrated his life, than mourned his death. Perhaps we can all try our best, however hard it may be, to do just this, as he once wanted.
With that in mind, I would like to end this page with what I feel is a fitting quote from Terry Pratchett, one of Ben's favourite authors. "The people of Ramtop village believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away; until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine he made has finished its ferment, until the crop he planted is harvested. The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence."
Ben liked to remind me, that what we do in life echoes in eternity. For so many of us, we will forever hear those echoes and Ben will always be alive in our memory.
Continue to my official Ben Horsman and Kathryn Berg memorial website here.