In the last couple of years Patrick and I wrote to each other often, but particularly once he became ill. He was too unwell to come to London and I was too unwell to visit him myself. We got into the habit of speaking regularly on the telephone but we also wrote to each other.
 
I set out to amuse him with anecdotes about my past, such as the occasion when a toilet wall fell on me at work or when I only narrowly avoided serious injury on the day the Uxbridge dry ski slope was opened.  Titles included ‘the day Susan Sontag wished me dead’, ‘the day Cyril Smith offered me his diet sheet’ or even ‘the day Reginald Bosanquet ran away.’ Or little news items like fact that the Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, who is the same age as me, and the world’s longest serving Prime Minister likes to be known as ‘princely exalted supreme great commander of gloriously victorious troops’.
 
However we both avoided the big issue. I have never been very good at sharing my deepest feelings, even with Patrick. I wrote this in the middle of the night and didn’t send it, possibly because I felt it was too consciously a goodbye, a goodbye I didn’t want to say. However, having looked at it again, I thought I would share it with friends who are doubtless missing him as much as I am.
 
Harrow, Middlesex
                                                                                    October 20 2023/3.20 am
 
Dear Patrick,
 
As you will no doubt have realised this letter has been written in the middle of the night – I stayed up to watch the two by-elections (by ‘stayed up’) I mean went to bed and left the television on in the hope that I would wake up when things got interesting. Low and behold I woke up just as the two results came in.
 
It was very rewarding (particularly the bits where the unsuccessful candidates scuttled away instead of staying to the end as politeness and protocol demands) and such was my delight I properly woke up and thought I would use the idle hour or so before my adrenalin levels dropped and I felt sleepy again in writing you my latest letter. 
 
I don’t know what inherited gene is responsible for it but I am definitely a night person – which I have always found very useful. Writing my university essays in the middle of the night meant I had peace and quiet to concentrate (though I did have to leave the final typing to more civilized hours). It also meant I could stay awake during election nights and on the occasion when I was wrenched from sleep in the early hours to go to Ealing Town Hall, while one of our council estates was burning down.
 
I am going to disappoint you if you are looking forward to some more juicy anecdotes. I think I still have ‘the day I went to a funeral with the Mayor of New York’ in hand. I have really loved writing to you. The exercise seems to have unblocked some bits of my memory that I am pleased to find again. I really should take your advice and find some publication that might be interested. It’s rather a niche market, as I am sure you would agree.
 
Instead of an anecdote I want to thank you for being a wonderful friend since that day when we met in the Hillingdon Mirror office. Laurie the news editor had told us what a funny letter you had written and what a good interview you had with her and Brian the editor, also slipping in the information that you had a stick of rock sticking out of your pocket.
 
Well done Richard Dillon for the tip off to you. I immediately gained an ally in the NUJ, where I had once been the only union member at the Mirror but more importantly gained a very dear friend (in every sense of the word other than expensive of course).
 
I don’t know if you remember what I said in my toast at your 60th birthday party in my back garden but it was to say that when we all so young and getting on with our lives, writing our news stories, complaining about the subs mangling our copy and the oppressive behaviour of the news editor, we were also doing something much more important – we were recruiting our friends – not just for the day to day but for the long haul. I am so glad we recruited each other. It is a sobering thought that Annie and Rachel are now older than we were when we first met.
 
I have many happy memories; sitting in a pub garden and trying to convince you that you really couldn’t make bees go away by shouting at them, many happy drinks, meals and outings. So many things that would not have happened without your friendship, things I would have missed out on, from going to Barcelona to being Annie’s godmother, which has been a privilege and a pleasure. Not to mention meeting so many of your friends and family as you and Julia built your life together. Also, I am not sure I would have made it to the GLC without you (and John McD of course) which proved a turning point for me.
 
It is now getting very late (or perhaps early) and it is really time I got some more sleep. Staying up like this, even if it is for such a worthy purpose as writing to a poorly and much loved friend is really an idiotic thing to do, I say this in the confident expectation that Steven won’t read this letter and berate me for my unsound language.
 
I’ll write again soon, with much love from Lesley