Nigel Pickard. Press photograph.
Until last week I’d never written an obituary before. Now I’ve written two in the space of a week for Peter Preston and Nigel Pickard. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever written because you’re so conscious of making a glaring error and possibly offending someone. Another difficulty is getting quotes from people to build up a more personal picture as you are inevitably going to miss out the people who felt they knew that person best. I have limited knowledge of both Nigel and Peter, although Nigel is someone I regularly chatted to at the Nottingham Writers’ Studio. Therefore, people I approached were people I’d seen him with and his respective publishers. It’s difficult to burden people when they’re grieving but fortunately both men were very well respected and so people were keen to see them remembered in the form they loved most: words.
Nigel Pickard died on 8 November which is also the anniversary of when my mother died. Within the next few days I began to learn lots about him; such as he co-edited Fin with Rosie Garner, that he’d had a collection of poems published with Shoestring Press, and that he was close friends with Martin Stannard who was working through a recent collection of Nigel’s poems on his travels through China. Megan Taylor had been workshopping fiction with him and that he’d recently more-or-less finished a third novel. After discovering so much I feel as if I should work my way through every member of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio to discover a little bit more about all of these people who I think I know, but clearly do not. It is a sad irony that death should reveal so many interesting facts and provoke endless questions that can only be answered by the person no longer there.
I can remember exactly where I was when Douglas Adams died. It was my JFK moment. Then the exciting news came though that he’d been working on a new book The Salmon of Doubt. I bought it the minute it came out and read it in one go. Only Adams could write about travelling ‘through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos’, but this also meant it was incomplete when it was published – because nobody could predict how Adams was going to link up such a complicated narrative. I can remember the finality of that last page, knowing the book would always be incomplete and that he’d taken his last piece of magic with him to the grave. Hopefully Megan Taylor, Rosie Garner and others will be able to piece together the various emails and versions of Nigel’s book to give us one more insight into his mind. Given Nigel’s clear love of family I suspect there will be no ‘nasals’ that need picking in the narrative, though I have been informed his handwritten notes are impossible to read. Nobody said it would be easy but the fact that people are trying tells you exactly how much he meant.
If you knew these men, please feel free to add comments at the end of their obituaries by logging on to the LeftLion website or email me directly. Our WriteLion page in the December issue of LeftLion will feature an illustration of Nigel’s beautiful poem Fog.
Nigel Pickard’s obituary Please join Weathervane Press at the Broadway Book Club at 7pm on Thursday 24 November where there will be readings from Nigel’s book Attention Deficit and other authors from Weathervane.
