Long life | 31 January 2013

I went to a funeral last Saturday, a depressingly frequent occurrence at my age. But it was an exceptional funeral, not only because of its gloriously peaceful rural setting amid the still snow-flecked hills of north-west Hampshire, or because of the beauty of the service that took place in the tiny village of Tangley’s charming Victorian church. It was exceptional because the person there being laid to rest in a wicker coffin was himself exceptional, one Peter Thomas Staheyeff Carson.

I became a good friend of Peter’s more than 50 years ago, when we were both undergraduates at Cambridge — he at Trinity College and I at Trinity Hall next door. We would see each other almost every day as members of what Lucinda Lambton, in her fine tribute in church, described as ‘his wildly-enjoying-ourselves group of friends’. But she could equally well have described us as friends who did no work and drank a great deal too much.