I always read th obituaries in the newspaper, not because I’m gloomy or morbid, but because I’m interested; sometimes the tributes are to people well-known, sometimes they are to people I’ve never heard of but were renowned in their field, or had achieved great things, sometimes modestly and with no wide acclaim. Quite often there are very contrasting obituaries announced on the same day.
Today there were three obituaries, a poet and wanderer, a translate of South American poets, a racing driver who seems to have crashed more times than he finished, and a doctor, inventor, walker and artist. What contrasting lives these three men had.
Alistair Reid was born in Galloway in Scotland in 1926, and like most men of that age he served during the war in the navy. After the war he went to University, and from then to a teaching position to America, and then to Spain to where he was ‘an acolyte’ of Robert Graves the poet. I understand that it was here that he began to learn and became fluent in Spanish. During the war he had worked deciphering codes, so maybe he had a facility for interpreting things in a different form from the English he was born with. He was a poet, and as such with his ability to translate Spanish, he was able to open the works of Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges to a wider audience; he is said to have been the person who introduced these wonderful poets to an international audience. He seems to have been a wandering sort of a person, travelling far and wide. he died last month at the age of eighty-eight.
Andrea de Cesaris was born in 1958; he was a handsome man judging by the photos in today’s newspaper, but as a Formula One racing driver, he was renowned for crashing the cars he raced. He had a mixture of success and catastrophic failure; apparently he was unlucky, but also he was such a dare-devil racer that sometimes the difficulties he got himself into were caused by himself. he was only relatively young when he died the last weekend in a motorbike accident near Rome, where he lost control of his bike and crashed into a railing.
Dr Alistair Brewis, died in July this year, at the age of 76. He sounds a fascinating man; he was born in 1937 and was very talented as an artist, which helped him when he was training to be a doctor because he did such perfect anatomical drawings. He began to specialise in respiratory conditions, and became pre-eminent in his field. He became the medical director of hospitals in Newcastle and was much respected and admired. One of his hobbies was making automaton… what an interesting thing to do as a pastime! His grandchildren were fascinated by them and loved the little moving figures that he made. He was a great walker, and loved the countryside he rambled through, and became an expert in many things, including a certain sort of spider, and Newcastle Town Moor. He sounds the sort of man who will not only be mourned and missed by friends and colleagues and all who knew him, but also be remembered for many, many years to come.
Lois Elsden 