I first met Jack Willoughby in ’79, when Inverness still smelt of Beef Hula Hoops and bad decisions. He wore a Harris Tweed duffel coat that had lost a fight with a pawnshop and he would stand on street corners cooing like a pigeon at passers-by. The guy could keep it up for days. I didn’t think much of him then. But boy, that cat could coo.

I saw him again in ’83. He was leaning out the window of an NYPD squad car, the city sliding past him like a bad alibi. He kept flashing his badge at an angle and bouncing sunlight into the eyes of a guide dog. “Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do?” he said, over and over, each time in a different accent. Some of them should’ve been illegal. All of them made me wish they were.

In ’95 I ran into him doing corporate gigs as a magician at the London Aquarium. His plastic surgery had gone terribly and there was cold despair in his eyes. Magic’s a rough line of work. Even the captive penguins knew it. They watched him from behind the glass with waddling pity. They wanted to help. But Penguins don’t speak pigeon.

The last time I saw Jack was at Stonehenge in 2015. He was mumbling something about advertising like it was a terminal illness. Then he struck an angular pose, sharp and sudden, like a man dodging a bullet that hadn’t been fired yet.

It was a dab. The first one. A decade before Tik Tok.