My obituaries habit gets ever stronger. I find there’s nothing as inspiring or instructive or entertaining as reading a few hundred words about someone’s time on this planet. My main dealers are the Times and Radio 4’s Last Word. Each batch throws together a varied mix, people who share only one thing in common: the fact that they checked out at the same time. All human life is here, as it were.
A good obituary knows we want stories, not lists of achievements. Some obituaries read like sitcom scripts. Like the obit for a rugby hero who played in a match between the British army of the Rhine and the French army. Twelve players were sent off, one of them our hero for landing a right hook on the nose of an opponent who had just bitten him on the genitals. Or the father of Michael Bond (he of Paddington), who on family holidays in the Isle of Wight would insist on wearing his hat in the sea in case he needed to raise it to anyone.
Others read like thrillers. A policeman involved in the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry despaired of his boss’s contempt for suggestions – such as that of a colleague who thought the killer drove a lorry because footprints showed one of his heels was more worn than the other. Peter Sutcliffe was indeed a lorry driver. Sometimes you’re left wondering. A billionaire set up a trust fund from which his children then gradually excluded him, leaving him and his wife to pen a book that ended with the line ‘Our nightmare will never end’.
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