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Dearest Gentle Reader,
There are Sundays upon which the news arrives not as gossip but as grief. Today is such a Sunday, and This Author sets aside her usual arched eyebrow to record, with genuine sorrow, the death of Nimsdai – the celebrated British-Nepali mountaineer who perished in an avalanche upon Broad Peak in Pakistan alongside nine fellow climbers. His body has now been recovered at approximately 5,700 metres, a height at which most of us would already be composing our wills. In 2019, the remarkable man scaled all fourteen of the world’s highest peaks in just over six months. That record will stand. That life, extinguished at forty-three, leaves a silence as vast as the mountain that claimed him.
The Prince of Wales was among those to pay tribute, noting that Nimsdai had “served with distinction” – first as a soldier, then as a man who made the impossible look like a morning constitutional. His brother Kamal’s words – “Your legacy will live forever” – are, for once, not mere ceremony. They are simply true.
From the sublime to the rather more earthly: This Author must now report, with all the gravity she can muster, upon the matter of Robert Bush, formerly of Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull. Mr Bush – an undertaker who contrived to mislay the dignity, the ashes, and in several cases the very persons of those entrusted to his care – has now faced justice in a Hull courtroom. He admitted 67 offences, including fraudulent trading and denying thirty people a proper burial, with some bereaved families receiving the ashes of strangers in lieu of their loved ones. Police identified 300 victims in total. This Author has encountered many who have treated the dead carelessly, but almost invariably they are speaking of a dinner party guest list. The details here are harrowing, and she will not dress them in wit. The families who sat in court four, clutching tissues, required and deserved rather more than that.
Now, if you will permit This Author to draw breath and reach for lighter fare: the Peak District – that most rugged and romantic of the Kingdom’s green expanses – has apparently sold its name. Temporarily, the signs welcoming visitors to that celebrated landscape now read “the Peaq District”, in honour of a new electric motor car manufactured by the Bohemian firm Skoda. Campaigners are, understandably, in a state of considerable agitation. One declared that national parks “selling their name to the highest bidder” placed us already “on the path to industrial extraction of the most protected landscapes.” Park authorities counter that the arrangement brings in funds sorely needed for conservation, given that government support has fallen by some forty per cent in real terms since 2010 while visitor numbers continue to swell. This Author sympathises with the predicament – one must keep the fells in good order somehow – but confesses that “the Peaq District” sounds rather as though someone sneezed upon the atlas.
Meanwhile, in the world of cinema and grief most bittersweet, This Author records the passing of filmmaker Justin Hardy, aged sixty-one, who died of a heart attack on Friday – a matter of weeks before the London premiere of Wrath of the Gods, his completion of the trilogy begun by his late father’s 1973 cult classic, The Wicker Man. His brother Dominic describes the final film as “incredibly beautiful.” That a man who devoted himself to finishing his father’s great work should not live to see it shown is the sort of cruel irony that belongs in the films themselves. His family called him “so full of life right to the end,” and one suspects that is exactly right. This Author sends her condolences, and recommends the film warmly to the Gentle Readership when it opens.
And finally, a tonic of pure absurdist delight from the constituency of Clacton, where Viscount Farage‘s resignation as its member of the Grand Assembly has generated not merely a by-election but the longest ballot paper in British electoral history. Ninety centimetres, Gentle Reader. Longer than most adults’ arms. The returning officer has described logistics as “manic” – a word that might also serve for the broader career of Viscount Farage himself. Polling stations must deploy double tables simply to accommodate the unfolded vote. At four times the printing cost of a standard ballot, one wonders whether candidates might consider carpooling. The previous record was set in 2008 with twenty-six candidates; Clacton has surpassed even that monument to democratic enthusiasm. Viscount Farage departed following scrutiny of his finances and a parliamentary investigation. He has, characteristically, left quite a paper trail.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.