So long, and thanks for all the fish

“Well, he had a good innings,” we mutter to the bereaved after the coffin has trundled away at the crematorium, or as we attempt to sustain polite small talk over the subsequent ham tea.

At any rate we say that of anyone who has made it past the age of … I guess around 85 these days, now that 80 is the new 60 and any death short of that is considered an untimely tragedy.

My thoughts precisely

I certainly had a good innings at The Journal: 469 columns over 9¾ years, missing only the odd week through illness. Albeit after a rather longer hiatus in mid-2006 when my then editor and I had a serious disagreement over whether Islamic terrorism was an appropriate subject for comedy. 

Holidays never stopped me – not even my honeymoon. And amazingly I am still married.

It all started a couple of years earlier, in October 2004, with a monthly column in the paper’s well-regarded business section. I persuaded the business editor to add me to his roster because I had recently moved back to the North East full time and felt I needed a hobby.

I also hoped to raise my local profile in the hope of winning some new clients for my alleged PR business. Even then there was no budget to pay me for my efforts, but I was content with that. I learned a new craft, different from the financial copywriting that had long been my mainstay, and I enjoyed it.

By the time I graduated to the main paper in February 2006 I had begun to harbour deluded hopes of earning a living from writing rather than PR, so I insisted on being paid a fee for my work. This was set at a token £50 per week and remained so until a couple of weeks ago, when I was advised that “Trinity Mirror’s new fee structure” would mean writing for nothing in future, or not writing at all.

I would have given sympathetic consideration to such a request from a not-for-profit organisation running a community newspaper. For a ruthlessly bottom line and bonus-focused plc like The Journal’s owner Trinity Mirror, whose chief executive Simon Fox is currently jogging along on a feeble £1.8 million per annum, I felt there could only be one answer.

A fat cat

It pains me to break with The Journal, which I have read for as long as I have been able to read at all. It was delivered every day to my childhood home, along with its sister papers the Evening Chronicle and Sunday Sun; and, rather eccentrically, the long defunct Daily Sketch.

It was a broadsheet in those days and much more of a national and international newspaper than it is today. Unusually, the Hann family was not watching television on the evening of Friday, November 22 1963, so the first my parents knew of the dramatic events in Dallas was when I woke them the next morning, clutching a copy of The Journal with the biggest banner headline I had ever seen, and asked, “Mummy, what does ‘assassinated’ mean?”

I had not encountered the word before, though as an intelligent nine-year-old I had already grasped that it was far from good news for that nice Mr Kennedy.

Today the front page splash would be something like “City mum vows to beat cancer” with a small box to the right: “US President killed: see page 5.”

The paper was still a broadsheet when I used it to announce the deaths of my parents in 1982 and 1992, and I’d always assumed that it would be where my own funeral arrangements would be publicised. But unless my cardiac disease gets its act together in the next few weeks I now feel pretty confident that the obsequies of The Journal will precede my own.

This is a crying shame but I have no answer. Every round of cost-cutting removes another few reasons to pick up the paper and there are now scarcely any left. I certainly shan’t be buying it again. But the underlying problem of an ageing and inevitably declining readership is not one that could be solved by throwing money at it, either.

Still, I certainly cannot complain. My second weekly column appeared on February 14 2006 and was unoriginally entitled “Be my Valentine”. It prompted an attractive young woman to e-mail me and initiate and intriguing if short-lived relationship.

That alone might be considered a pretty good return on 700 casually dashed off words, but a later column actually found me a wife, and led to the totally unexpected arrival of two intermittently delightful children.

Rarely in the entire history of global journalism can any writer have been better rewarded for his work. On top of this there have been the many kind words I have received from readers who have written, e-mailed or stopped me in the street to say that they have enjoyed something I have written.

I am grateful to absolutely everyone who has ever read my column, and particularly to Iain Laing for giving me my first opportunity and Brian Aitken for making it a weekly event.

Now I have got into the habit of writing a column every seven days I am going to find it very hard to stop, so this website is a godsend.

But for The Journal, I can only echo Douglas Adams’ dolphins. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

The consoling power of favourite quotations

It is sad but true, as William Hazlitt famously observed, that “The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.”

Given my privileged opportunity to comment on any of the huge issues facing the world today, from climate change to the electability of Ed Miliband, it seems rather pathetic that the only thing of really gripping interest to me is today’s appointment at Wansbeck General Hospital to learn the outcome of some recent tests.

But there comes a tipping point in all our lives when death ceases to be a distant and theoretical concern, mainly affecting others, and comes to command our attention with the same sort of force as an oncoming juggernaut, careering madly towards us on the wrong side on the road.

It seems like yesterday that I was constantly making forward-looking suggestions and being frustrated by an older generation’s shrugging acceptance of the status quo, usually with the words, “It will see me out.”

Now I am firmly in their camp, my short-sighted selfishness tempered only by a sense of duty to my two sons, who could easily still be around in 90 years time. If anyone is.

Although constant awareness of the Grim Reaper’s stealthy approach is unnerving, age does have its compensations over and above the Senior Railcard. Perhaps the greatest of these is a sense of perspective, and the growing realisation that the Tory Prime Minister Arthur Balfour was right when he declared that “Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.”

A.J. Balfour, nephew of Lord Salisbury: "Bob's your uncle!"

We are just moderately intelligent monkeys clinging to a rock spacecraft as it hurtles around a dying star. Our stay aboard is remarkably short and the best we can do is to make it as enjoyable as possible, both for ourselves and for our fellow travellers.

I have already tuned out the long-running general election campaign as so much white noise. It doesn’t look as though anyone can win it outright and it is hard to see any of the possible permutations of coalition making a material difference to our lives.

Particularly when you consider that many of the things Labour attacks most bitterly, such as the growth of private provision within the NHS, are simply the continuation of policies they themselves pursued when last in power.

We should always beware of anyone who presents us with a big plan to change things for the better. Socialism, communism and fascism all did that, and look how well they went.

The creation of the European Union and the euro were similarly billed as vehicles to prosperity and peace. Those of us who argued that they were likely to create just the opposite were cried down as reactionary fools.

Now that the continent is economically stagnant and mired in debt, with extremist parties on the rise across it, it is interesting to note how little we hear from those who screamed that Britain would be massively disadvantaged if it let the euro train leave the station without us on board.

Though they are the self-same voices issuing dire warnings of the fate that will befall us if we are mad enough to vote to leave the EU in a referendum, if we ever elect a Government so foolish as to hold one.

I’d like to think I might live long enough to vote for my country’s independence but I have to accept that the country I fondly remember has vanished forever, and no vote is going to bring it back.

So I’m off to see my consultant resolved to try and be a bit nicer to my fellow human beings for as long as I am spared; and I will endeavour to stick to that resolution even if what he mainly diagnoses is a bad case of hypochondria.

At the very least I will have had a salutary warning that should inspire me to try harder. For, as Dr Johnson observed, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

While if the worst comes to the worst I can always console myself with another favourite quote from Evelyn Waugh: “All fates are worse than death.”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The horrific killer that succumbs to soap and water

I have never much cared for horror films myself, but their huge box office appeal attests to the deep and widespread human need to scare ourselves witless.

Whether it is ghosts, terrorists, alien invaders, zombies, microbes, velociraptors, sharks, mad axemen or dear old global warming, most of us love to fret that there is something lurking out there that is going to get us.

And in the long run, of course, something will. But I suspect it won’t be Ebola, despite the feverish interest it is currently arousing in the British media.

Exactly why are our news bulletins currently being led by an outbreak of a disease that has so far claimed around 4,000 lives, nearly all of them in places far, far away? Particularly when, as our man on the spot David Banks pointed out on Friday, it comes well down the running order of bulletins in West Africa itself.

To put the Ebola death toll in some sort of context, malaria kills over 600,000 people every year. Influenza, which you are somewhat more likely to contract in the UK, typically kills 250 – 500,000 people annually, rising into the millions during its regular pandemics.

True, there is no cure for Ebola and it sounds a very unpleasant way to die. But it is far from invariably fatal and, having made the mistake of reading a book called “How We Die” a few years ago, I can tell you with some confidence that there aren’t many ways to go that make you think “Ooh, I rather fancy a bit of that.”

There are other reasons for positive thinking, not least the fact that it is really quite hard to catch Ebola. The key way to protect yourself is to take great care not to touch anyone who has already got it. And, if you fail on that front, the critical back-up is to remember to wash your hands afterwards, with soap and water.

If I were pitching this as a plot outline for a top ranking horror movie, I think I might give up at this point and move swiftly on to my other brilliant idea about a giant man-eating Venus flytrap.

I have reached the point when my school contemporaries are starting to succumb to the ravages of age. One is currently recovering in hospital following major heart surgery. Another recently announced his early retirement following a stroke.

Both were and are considerably slimmer and fitter than I am, but then those who have already handed in their dinner pails were, without exception, “the last person you would expect”.

One of my mother’s favourite bits of Alnwick folk wisdom was “You’re frightened of the death you’ll never die”. Having observed the departure of her entire generation, born in the decade before the First World War, I can vouch for the almost universal truth of this claim.

Yes, there was the odd grotesque fatty who keeled over with a heart attack and one or two smokers who duly succumbed to lung cancer, but she and most of her contemporaries lost their lives to things that had never even registered on their worry radars.

Luckily death seems to be something that absolutely all of us can manage, when the time comes, without unduly embarrassing ourselves or those around us. Thus putting it, in my case, in a considerably easier box than drinking soup.

It has faded of late, but for years the thing that made me wake up in a cold sweat was not the prospect of extinction but the thought of having to take my A-levels again. Surely death will be easier than that, with the added bonus that there will be no danger of marking errors or re-sits.

The real stuff of nightmares

Until then, I shall continue trying to follow my late mother’s advice that death will get us whether we worry about it or not, so we might as well not worry.

However, if you absolutely insist on worrying, may I suggest that you focus on excessive consumption of meat pies, cigarettes and strong lager rather than Ebola?

Book yourself a flu jab, arrange your holiday somewhere other than Sierra Leone and always, but always, take care to wash your hands.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Those who fail to respect Lady Thatcher are the real nasty party

I could have written about Margaret Thatcher in this space last week, but I was too sad.

Saddened less at the passing of a sick, old woman than by the nauseating joy of the unreconstructed Left on her demise. One need not contemplate their antics for long to know who is, and always has been, the real “nasty party” in British politics.

Before Thatcher good socialists surely drank light ale, not champagne

Arguably too young to know any better

I was 24 when Mrs Thatcher came to power and frankly unsure that this new-fangled idea of putting a suburban housewife in control of the levers of Government would get us very far. I was pleasantly surprised.

I find it hard to believe that any sane person who grew up amidst the turmoil of never-ending strikes, or endured the utter uselessness of our Soviet-style State-owned utilities and manufacturing industries, could fail to welcome their end at the hands of the Iron Lady.

For me and many others, she turned despair at Britain’s apparently unstoppable decline into hope that we might yet enjoy growing prosperity and freedom, and play a useful role on the international stage.

The immense and, outside Argentina, overwhelmingly positive international coverage of her life over the last week underlines the huge respect that she enjoyed worldwide for helping to bring down the Soviet Union and free the nations of eastern Europe after nearly half a century of subjugation.

Reagan/Thatcher 1   Soviet Union 0 (after extra time)

Ah but, her critics say, even the good things she did went sour in the end: the council house sales of the 1980s begetting the credit crunch and housing crisis of today, victory in the Falklands laying the ground for subsequent, less successful interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Really? Surely a woman who left office in 1990 cannot be blamed for what went so horribly wrong under the leadership of her much less talented successors 10 or 20 years later?

If any criticism can be made, it might be that the sheer dominance of her personality and policies apparently deprived those who followed her of the power of independent thought, turning the stark choice of the 1983 general election between Thatcher and Michael Foot into the bland, middle-of-the-road capitalist consensus of Blairism and the Coalition.

I would welcome another Thatcher, whether from Left or Right, who would once again offer us a really meaningful choice at the ballot box.

As for the appropriateness of tomorrow’s funeral arrangements, let me offer a rare word of praise for Gordon Brown: because all the essential details of Lady Thatcher’s funeral were agreed with the Government four years ago when he was in power.

The notion that this is some sort of party political stunt devised by David Cameron is simply incorrect. 

When objective history comes to be written, I am sure that Lady Thatcher’s achievements will be ranked amongst the most important of any peacetime Prime Minister of the 20th century, fully justifying the honours that were bestowed upon her in life and, tomorrow, in death.

Yes, Attlee also transformed Britain and did not receive a State or ceremonial funeral. But, with respect, Labour’s crowning achievement of 1945-51, the NHS, has been so hugely successful that it has been copied precisely nowhere. While the key tenets of Thatcherism from monetary policy to privatisation have been adopted throughout the world.

At least the modest Earl made it to Westminster Abbey

The fact that Lady Thatcher was, in the BBC’s favourite word of the moment, “divisive”, is irrelevant. Few 19th century politicians were more divisive than Gladstone, who even split his own Liberal party over Irish Home Rule, yet he was rightly accorded a full State funeral on his demise in 1898. Disraeli turned one down.

Gladstone lying in state in Westminster Hall: a marked absence of a flag

Oddly enough the only politician I ever loathed enough to feel moved to crack open a bottle of champagne on his death was another Tory, Edward Heath. I was deeply upset by the total dishonesty with which he initially pretended that our membership of the Common Market involved “no essential loss of sovereignty”.

Even so, I was wrong to celebrate his passing, as those who are planning to demonstrate against Lady Thatcher tomorrow will be on the wrong side not just of history, but of humanity.

Death is the one certainty for us all, and every death diminishes us. The only proper response to it is sympathy and respect.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Handwriting and thinking: on the way out together?

When I was a boy, people still let it be known that there had been a death in the family by keeping their curtains closed all day.

Last week, for the first time, I spotted someone announcing his mother’s death on Facebook. This is one “status update” it is clearly a breach of etiquette to “like”, despite the website’s inbuilt encouragement to be the first to do so.

At least this made me realise how very old fashioned I was to agonise for ages about whether I might compose a letter of condolence to a friend on my computer, rather than with pen and ink.

I do most things electronically these days. Where I would once have written a letter of thanks, I now invariably send an e-mail. But I had always drawn the line at expressing sympathy in print.

Partly lest it be thought that I had just cut and pasted my condolences from some previous missive, and partly because it seems rather insulting to address such an important issue in trouble-free laser print rather than painfully neat handwriting.

Pain, sadly, being the operative word. Years of abuse, scribbling rapid notes at meetings, have rendered my once award-winning italic script all but illegible, no matter how hard I work at it. I started sending out Christmas cards with a printed name and address after several people complained that even my signature had become such a scrawl that they had wasted valuable time puzzling over who the card was from.

So I gave in and sent a printed letter that was, I consoled myself, at least several times better than one of those ghastly printed “With Sympathy” cards.

Buy in bulk: there is sure to be another flu epidemic this winter

And a week or so later I was relieved to receive, by e-mail, a message from my friend thanking me for my “perfect” letter, so an unfortunate precedent has now been set.

Handwriting used to be such an important test of character. Many a promising relationship rapidly petered out when I discovered that a potential girlfriend was in the habit of adorning her vowels with hearts or smiles.

How will my sons manage without this quick and easy litmus test for lunacy at their disposal?

This is not to imply for a second that the so-called “science” of graphology is anything other than total bosh. I can state this with confidence because, a few years ago, a client submitted a sample of my own handwriting for such a test, and shared the results with me.

Apparently I am hugely talented and immensely ambitious, with the energy of ten normal men. Anyone who has read one of these columns, let alone actually met me, will know instantaneously that this is the absolute reverse of the truth.

Not only am I monumentally lazy, my attention span has also now atrophied to the point where I felt hugely proud of myself on Saturday when, for the first time in months, I actually sat down and read a whole book.

True, it was a rather short book written by someone I know, and based on a premise so outrageously untrue that I simply had read it.

Even so, where I would once have been literally unable to put it down, I felt obliged to take regular breaks to check the latest developments on my e-mail, Twitter and Facebook.

We are all becoming infantilised by this never-ending stream of news and the instantaneous, crude and usually cynical reactions to it. It now requires a real effort of will to pause, concentrate and really think about an issue before we pronounce on it.

Sadly precious few of our political leaders seem capable of doing so.

Perhaps it would be helpful to them and us if, every now and then, we pulled the plug on the constant storm of electronic chaff; turned our mobiles and computers off, and our minds on. Maybe we could draw the curtains, too, to minimise the distractions from outside.

After all, why should we wait for a death in the family to prompt us to reflect on what really matters? 

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Facing up to that overwhelming sense of time running out

I once found it ridiculous that nearly every mention of anyone in a newspaper should be followed by a bracketed reference to their age. Why on earth did that matter?

Today, Keith Hann (58) is completely nonplussed in the rare instances when this detail is omitted, because age provides the essential context for my reaction. An accidental death at 19 is almost always going to seem sadder than at 91.

Though if the 91-year-old met their end surfing on top of a train after downing a case of alcopops, it does make for a more unusual and arresting story.

I remember being mildly amused by the fact that my parents’ first port of call in their Journal and Evening Chronicle was always the “deaths” column; but it has now been mine, too, for many years.

I cannot recall exactly when death changed from being a vague, theoretical possibility to the central consideration of my life, but I suspect that it was somewhere around the age of 40. Perhaps it comes later for women, because Mrs Hann just laughs when I try to explain that some element of her forward planning is of limited relevance to me because I won’t be around to see it come to fruition.

It does not seem so long since I found myself similarly frustrated when suggesting improvements to a family property and being met with indifference on the grounds that “it will see me out”. Though in that instance the pessimists proved correct, as pessimists so often do.

Right now, Mrs Hann and I are juggling my desire to live and die in rural Northumberland with our work commitments elsewhere, and the knowledge that where we are living this December will determine where our older son starts his first school next September.

Buying a new home is not the simple option it once appeared, when a 25-year mortgage would run until I am 83 or, on the evidence of 300 years of Hann family mortality statistics, long dead. A fact that is evidently not lost on potential sources of such finance, judging by their marked reluctance to provide it.

The revolutionary iCoffin: surely the perfect last word for a PR man? (With acknowledgements to onceuponageek.com)

I have no life insurance, because what was the point of spending money on that when I had no wife or dependents to benefit from it? (Added to which, I hoped that more distant relatives and godchildren might greet the news of my demise with unadulterated sorrow, rather than as the harbinger of a lucky windfall.)

While my pension provision, thanks to the feeble performance of the stock market as well as my own improvidence, makes my retirement seem a more implausible fantasy than my three-year-old’s current concerns about the ogre that apparently inhabits a tree in our garden, or the tiger that regularly takes up residence beneath his bed.

The bottom line is that I find myself with responsibility for the future of two small boys and a strategy for their housing and education almost entirely based on winning the National Lottery.

Or, after 40 years of mainly scribbling for a living, suddenly coming up with the latest answer to Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey. Realistically, I think we have far more chance of winning the Lottery.

But, as you read this, I will be sitting at my desk with my phone off the hook and my email inbox disabled, staring at a blank screen as I try to start the short book that someone recklessly commissioned two months ago, and which now needs to be delivered in just five short weeks.

I will be breaking off only for my long deferred annual check-up at the doctor’s tomorrow, which can surely only add fuel to my slow-burning fire of fatalistic gloom.

My book? Oh, it is a supposedly humorous short guide to opera, about which I know a little. Though my main hope, if I get it done, is naturally for a follow-up commission on my specialist subject: trying to work out how much time I have got left.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Awed by the sheer randomness of existence

It seems that the most dangerous age for rock stars is 27. While for baby boomers like me, born in 1954, 57 is starting to look less like an English summer pasture, filled with gorgeous wildflowers, and more like a tropical swamp infested with mosquitoes and crocodiles, and surrounded by heavily armed fanatics.

In the last few weeks I have learned of the deaths of three of my school contemporaries, all from natural causes rather than as the result of some freak accident. They were not friends of mine, but with my elephantine memory I naturally remember them well. And in my mind they are still smiling miniatures in blazers and short trousers, full of life and promise.

I really must learn how to scan those black and white form photographs from the 1960s ...

None of them, curiously, was the sort of overweight and physically inferior specimen that one might have marked down for an early exit. In my class, that was undoubtedly me. The fat kid squatting glumly on the floor of the gymnasium as his schoolfellows swarmed nimbly to the top of the ropes. The one who always landed on the near end of the vaulting horse with a groin-shattering crunch, and who somehow endured eight years of swimming classes without ever learning to swim a stroke.

No, these were normally proportioned, fit and healthy lads who should have been actuarially good for whatever average life expectancy is these days (and remember that it will have increased by three hours in the day that has passed between my writing these words and your reading them).

Yet they are gone and I am somehow still here. Which is handy given that, after an apparently rather precocious start, I somehow lapsed into a state of lazily suspended animation for about four decades, and have only recently emerged from my chrysalis as one of the world’s ultimate late developers.

Here I am slowly and rather reluctantly learning the rudiments of parenting at an age when most people are indulging their grandchildren (or, in less privileged postcodes, great grandchildren). And being told by my headshaking financial adviser what a great pity it is that I did not have the foresight to take out a whacking great life insurance policy before I was known to have a heart condition, albeit at a time of my life when I had no dependants and could see no earthly use for such provision.

The dreadful news of this last weekend powerfully underlines the complete randomness of existence and the utter folly of attempting to discern patterns or draw conclusions from it. Alerted by Twitter to the unfolding catastrophe in Norway, I turned on the BBC news channel where an American “expert” banged on at inordinate length about how the attacks bore all the classic hallmarks of being planned and perpetrated by jihadists.

Even when it was pointed out to him that all the reports spoke of a blond-haired, blue-eyed gunman, his confidence did not skip a beat. Surely his interviewer was aware of the increasing sophistication of these organisations in recruiting individuals who were less likely to arouse suspicion?

The idea that this might be the dastardly work of some home-grown loon simply never occurred to him, any more than I anticipated my late fatherhood or the premature departure of the boys I grew up with.

It is very hard to draw any useful conclusions from all this, other than that the one thing in this life on which we can bet with confidence is its complete unpredictability. But I shall make these admittedly unoriginal resolutions: to enjoy life while I can, and try living every day on the assumption that it will be my last. With any luck it won’t be, but it might make me behave more kindly to the people I meet along the way, and that can never be a bad thing for any of us.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Farewell to a fine old countryman

We know that nothing is forever, not even the sun and stars. Yet death always comes as a terrible shock, however old or poorly the deceased. So I was duly stunned on Friday morning when news reached me of the passing of my next-door neighbour of 23 years, Andrew Beresford.

Etta and Andrew, 2005

It would be idle to pretend that Andrew (or “Mr Beresford” as I always called him) and I had a huge amount in common, beyond the proximity of our living arrangements. We did not get off to the best possible start when he hailed me aggressively over the garden wall as I inspected the semi-derelict cottages I had just acquired. Few people could invest the words “Can I help you?” with quite so much menace.

But after an introductory period of chilly mutual misunderstanding, I began to develop a huge respect for the man and his lifestyle. He and his wife Etta kept goats, pigs, turkeys and chickens, and grew vegetables and fruit. Many country people enjoy eggs from their own hens; few also cure the bacon to go with them. A series of chest freezers allowed them to enjoy their own produce all year round. (Never believe anyone who tries to tell you that frozen food is rubbish.)

Andrew's goats

The henhouse with the finest view in England

Indeed, they seemed to have little need of shops except to buy the odd bottle of whisky. A fire burned in their grate 365 days a year and the smell of home baking regularly filled their kitchen. It was exactly the sort of life of rural self-sufficiency I had always dreamt of for myself, but will almost certainly never realise.

But Andrew also had skills that I could never dream of mastering. He was a man of prodigious strength, whose ability to drive a fence post into hard ground with his bare hands never ceased to amaze me. He had an immense knowledge of horses, having begun work on farms in the days when they were the principal source of power. He broke horses to harness and drove them in traps and carts he had built himself. He also carved beautiful walking sticks, one of which I shall treasure as a memento of his skill.

Some of Andrew's horses

Some of Andrew's carts

Above all he was, beneath his occasionally forbidding exterior, a warm and generous neighbour with a great love of children. For years I took him a daily copy of The Journal when I was not working away from home (which was, I regret to say, all too frequently). I had only recently handed on that baton to my two-year-old son, and will never forget him proudly walking up the garden path with a copy of the paper tucked under his arm, repeatedly rehearsing his line, “Ayo, Mr Beresford, I bring you paper!”

A line which somehow got shyly abbreviated to “Paper!” at the moment of delivery, but still raised a smile.

Andrew with the Hann family, November 2010

Although he was 87 and had been in poor health for some time, I never imagined that I had seen the last of Andrew. And, as usual when someone departs, there are regrets: in this case that I never told him what a very high regard I had for him. Perhaps it would have been better to put it in a column before he died, though more likely it would just have caused embarrassment all round.

So let me conclude this uncharacteristically uncynical piece by offering my most sincere condolences to his widow Etta, sons Neville and Scott, and all his extended family. Andrew, it was a privilege to have known you.

And if there is anyone out there – whether in your family or among your friends and neighbours – that you really admire, respect or even love, and you have never let them know, take a tip from me. Tell them today. Because tomorrow may turn out to be too late.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.