This is one of questions, that in the blur of the funeral of my friend Marie Nally, I starkly remember. It was part of a brief eulogy that had been emailed, and someone - I think it was my friend and work partner Nina - read it out in the service, shaking with the A4 in her hand. Marie had a strong online network of friends, chiefly though her engagement in the breast cancer cause (the disease that took her life), for which she paved the way for so much of todays' Internet support and discussion.
It's still a question of the utmost poignancy and loneliness of grief, articulate of the fundamental limits of our expression: technological limits, emotional limits.
Last week came the news of the death - also from cancer - of Robert Woof. Robert was the director of the Wordsworth Trust in nearby Grasmere, and an irreplaceable and inspiring friend to my partner Adam and I. Robert was a man of enormous intellect, but rarely for an academic, his erudition was woven into a vast net which - at lightning speed - would have him making the most inspirational cross-references. Even for much younger guests - as often the Grizedale artists we have with us are - an evening with Robert was a totoally engaging cross-cultural tour at breakneck speed.
Robert is pictured here at an unforgettable dinner at our house a few months ago with the film-maker Ken Russell and many other notable guests. I had the honour (and it really was) of sitting between these wise men for the meal, and enjoying a conversation that leapt from the sadomasochism of Percy Grainger (something I know a little about thanks to my school music teacher - another story for another blog) to elderberry pie, to road planning in the Lake District and many places in between. For once, I shut up and savoured being the audience. Robert knew he had limited time. He had a huge appetite for food, wine and conversation that evening and - as so often at dinners with Robert - the night ended in the small hours, with his wife Pamela, encouraging him out into the darkness to be driven home.
In so many ways Robert was much kinder to the Lake District than it was to him. He never gave up working tirelessly to promote the place's most famous cultural export - Wordsworth - in both the lowest and highest circles. Here was a man who in his seventies, was taking the first train down to London at 5 in the morning, to appear on Breakfast TV listening to some dreadful 6 year olds who who recited 'I wandered lonely as a cloud...', deafeningly, in a circle around him. Every Tuesday, a few hours before one of the Trust's poetry evenings, Robert would personally call you up (knowing, as he did, that I hate poetry - not that that ever came between us) and cajole you into coming to the event. They were always fun, and this typifies Robert's charm and persistance, his belief in his mission and his personal accountability for its success. And yet the Trust's library building (which finally opened this summer) - a cause which ate so much of Robert's energy in the last few years - was a feud with the planners on an epic scale, a needlessly and pointlessly protracted war with a council who should know so very much better.
So, Adam is on the other side of the planet in Japan, when he receives an email with the news. He must cry online.
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