High life | 4 May 2017
I’m sitting in my office and the place is still. The rest of the house is dark. Everyone’s out and I’m here writing about the death of a friend. I haven’t felt such gloom since my father died 28 years ago. The question why did he have to die is implicitly followed by another: how did he live his life? The answer to that one is easy: recklessly. Learning how to die, according to Montaigne, is unlearning how to be a slave. Nick Scott, who died last week in India, was no slave. Nick went to Eton. He was an army man and a very talented landscape artist and gardener,