Sunday Thoughts: My Friend Kris

I have many reasons to be thankful for TheSixthAxis. This website has given me a lot over the years but there’s one thing I value more than any other: the friendships. I’ve made several really good, honest friendships in my time working on the site and although they all deserve to be mentioned in their own right, I only want to talk about one in particular today.

[drop2]Kris Lipscombe is our features editor. When I asked him to join TSA a few years ago, it was just as we were embarking on our coverage of consoles other than the PlayStation 3 and Kris was one of the few “friends of the site” I knew that had a 360 and would fit snugly into the way we work here.

I suppose that in those early days, I thought of him as “Davs’ friend”. The radio show and podcast that Kris ran with former TSA staffer (and another good friend of mine) known to most as djhsecondnature defined my early perception of him. But now, I consider Kris as one of my best friends. There are very few people who I miss if I don’t have contact with them every week. Kris is one of them.

The reason I’m writing Sunday Thoughts this week, and the reason why it’s all about Kris, is because tomorrow is his birthday. He’s taking a few days off to celebrate it, recover from those celebrations and hopefully to relax a little bit. So, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a few things that I like about Kris and hopefully give you some insight into the man’s very unique brand of loveable weirdness.

Here is a brief and tremendously incomplete list of some of my favourite things about Krismas Lipscombe (real name).

• He mentions a foodstuff in almost every single email to me. Sometimes, if his email didn’t involve food or if there was no way to work food into the email naturally, he’ll just write “BACON” or something at the bottom.
• He loves dinosaurs. I don’t know anyone else who progressed past the age of 9 and retained that slack-jawed, wide-eyed love of dinosaurs.
• He explains things more than once. Kris decided to invent a new word a couple of weeks ago: “bluv”. It’s an amalgam of “blud” and “bruv”. I know this because he’s used it several times in separate emails and after each use, he writes in parentheses “that’s my mixture of blud and bruv”. Every time.
• He decided to invent a new word. This deserved its own bullet point, separately to the inclusion in the above point. Kris will just do these random silly things to amuse himself and that, in turn, amuses me.
• He can’t say most words out loud. Despite being a great podcast host, radio host and editor, Kris pronounces almost everything incorrectly. If you listen to the podcast, you’ll know that this is one of our favourite things to point out. Every week, there’s a new word Kris says weirdly and every week I love hearing it.
• Sometimes I call him Christopher, despite that not even being his name, just to annoy him and he doesn’t ever stab me in the neck with a pair of scissors. I think this shows remarkable restraint on his part.
• He explains things to me and expects me to know what he’s talking about. Kris is very clever. Sometimes, I ask him about things and he returns a series of words that seem to make perfect sense to him but leave me wondering if half of them were made up. I smile and nod and ask Alex instead. Alex knows when to dumb things down for me.
• He puts up with a lot. One of the things that I need in a friend is the ability to tolerate my endless moaning, terrible jokes and good-natured slagging off of everything about them. Kris can listen to me call him a shoeless, patchouli-sniffing hippy every week for six months and laugh it off.

There are, of course, lots of very sensible reasons why Kris is one of my best friends but those aren’t very entertaining. Nobody wants to hear about the times Kris has prevented me from going crazy or giving up on something that was quite important. Nobody really cares about his ability to organise things so I don’t fall to pieces or the way he reassures me when I think I’m the worst person in the world. It’s much more fun to remember that he can’t say “penguin” properly and, to be perfectly honest, that’s just as important.

I should probably cut this off now, it’s difficult to know when to stop. If Kris was editing this text he’d probably send me an email saying something along the lines of “it’s quite good but you go on a bit at the end and people might get bored”. So, I guess what I’m saying is this: If you didn’t like this week’s Sunday Thoughts, blame Kris for not editing it.