This has been a difficult day. My friend, my client, Mal Peet, died last night.
Mal was – and it seems almost obscene to use the past tense – the writer’s writer. An incredibly accomplished word technician, held in equal parts awe, esteem and affection by his peers.
The man and the writer were inseparable – and as a man, he was warm-hearted, impishly witty, generous to a fault and impossible not to like. Make that love. Impossible not to love.
I don’t know what else to say at the moment, except for one thing.
A strange thing; a thread that connected us.
I read Mal’s LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM only after taking him on as a client. Before that, I knew nothing of the book’s contents.
Mal, like me, had grown up in a remote part of Norfolk. LIFE is probably the most autobiographical of all his works, and it is set there.
As I read it, I became aware that one of the book’s characters – minor, but significant in plot terms – could only have been my own long-dead father.
We had dinner. He confirmed that the art teacher he had so deftly defined was indeed my father.
I don’t know what the chances of that happening are – impossible to calculate.
But there it was: a bond, a thread of connection. Now undone.
Or maybe not.
I want to say more, but that’s it for me today. My thoughts now are with Mal’s family who, like the rest of us, have been untimely robbed of a great soul.
Mal was – and it seems almost obscene to use the past tense – the writer’s writer. An incredibly accomplished word technician, held in equal parts awe, esteem and affection by his peers.
The man and the writer were inseparable – and as a man, he was warm-hearted, impishly witty, generous to a fault and impossible not to like. Make that love. Impossible not to love.
I don’t know what else to say at the moment, except for one thing.
A strange thing; a thread that connected us.
I read Mal’s LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM only after taking him on as a client. Before that, I knew nothing of the book’s contents.
Mal, like me, had grown up in a remote part of Norfolk. LIFE is probably the most autobiographical of all his works, and it is set there.
As I read it, I became aware that one of the book’s characters – minor, but significant in plot terms – could only have been my own long-dead father.
We had dinner. He confirmed that the art teacher he had so deftly defined was indeed my father.
I don’t know what the chances of that happening are – impossible to calculate.
But there it was: a bond, a thread of connection. Now undone.
Or maybe not.
I want to say more, but that’s it for me today. My thoughts now are with Mal’s family who, like the rest of us, have been untimely robbed of a great soul.
