Dear Bobby

 First of all, Happy Birthday! I hope you are having a good one there, in heaven. I imagine you smoking a joint and laughing at human race from above. I imagine God sitting next to you, cutting a pineapple and going 'Play something for us, Bobby'. 
 You and I never had a chance to meet. And you don't even know that you are one of my longest lasting friendship, my most faithful companion.

 My dear Bobby, you don't even know in what kind of world I am celebrating your Birthday! It's a cold London, paralized by a tube strike and several othe things you would laugh about if you were here. We had a bautiful new moon just some nights ago, the one you can sing for and live for at the time when you feel low. But better let me start from the beginning.

 I think I was twelve or maybe thirteen when my mom, or maybe it was my sister who always listened to 'Buffalo soldier' before sleep, gave me a tape with your music. It was then when I started to love reggae and I got myself a three-coloured bracelet done, and I wanted to be like you or at least somebody just as cool. It was you, not Manu Chao, who was bringing these familiar rhythms to my head everytime it was needed and whom I understood as the only musician of my teenage years. It was you who found me at the end of the world, in the hostel where I lived in a room called 'Bob Marley's Room'. It was you singing 'Bad Boys' from the speakers when we were dancing with my friends on some Caribbean island, and when police came all of a sudden and arrested one of our friend for having smoking weed on the beach. It is you about whom I think everytime I meet my Jamaican neighbours, and read my old interview with a reggae DJ, about whom nobody had heard in London before but whom I interviewed just because he reminded me of you. 

 Someone once said that strangers make the best friends. I believe this is my story. So I'll better go to sleep not to take you too long, and once again, Happy Birthday, Bobby, The Immortal.