Bringing obituaries to life

I used to be a foreign correspondent. Sometimes I thought it was a pretty glamorous job. At dinner parties I might occasionally drop hints about the dangerous sorts of places I had been to. But the only people who cared were other foreign correspondents, and then only because they were eager to dwarf my boasts with their own tales of derring-do. To my youthful indignation, nobody else gave a hoot.

Now I am the obituaries editor at the Telegraph. Quite a career shift, I’m prepared to admit. These days if people ask what I do I tend to mumble something about being a journalist. But this, I’m afraid to say, is not because I am now wiser and less vain. Rather, it is because I have discovered that the job of obituaries editor, unlike that of foreign correspondent, is something that people are actually fascinated by. These days, if someone learns precisely what I do, the chances are that they will be ravenous for every detail.