Goodbye, my dear Low Life colleague

He bore his death sentence more gracefully than most heroes I’ve read about. As the end approached, his columns showed no self-pity or regrets. Meticulous detail was Jeremy’s forte, and atmosphere. Oh, how I envied his ability to convey the mood of a place, the setting that he was writing about. He could replicate a conversation in a pub as if he had recorded it, and it never once sounded made up. 

He was the patron saint of the poor but happy. Unlike his predecessor Jeffrey Bernard, who weekly lamented about being broke and ill, Jeremy was the exact opposite, describing his cancer towards the end like a disinterested scientist quoting from a medical case. The first time we met, just after he had begun writing his column, he bowed because of my high ranking in a martial art and called me ‘sensei’ – teacher in Japanese. I laughed and it was the start of a beautiful friendship, one that culminated when we both went on a Spectator-sponsored cruise with readers from Venice down to Crete and on to Piraeus. 

But years before the cruise, his humour and sense of mischief and fun had made me his greatest fan. It began at a Spectator garden party, at which the then prime minister David Cameron was present. Out of the blue Jeremy produced a bottle of absinthe, the liquor that drove Van Gogh crazy enough to chop off his ear, and was known to have killed hundreds if not thousands. I immediately indulged, so much so that the sainted editor came over like a schoolmaster and warned us about the evils of alcohol. After a while, and now very much in our cups, Jeremy proposed some coke. Let’s do it, I said and we headed for the bathroom.