Goodbye, Jeremy

Each week I opened The Spectator at Low Life in part to read that brilliant column and, more recently, to see how Jeremy Clarke was coping with his deteriorating health. Always hoping the column would be there; that he had, despite excruciating pain, penned us another. Like very many of his regular admiring readers, I had found the last two weeks disturbingly sad and last week we learned that he has died and is free at last from his suffering.

As an oncologist, during a career treating thousands of patients, at first ones with prostate and other urological cancers, and later ones with breast cancer, I have seen the ravages of metastatic cancer in its many and varied forms and observed how people cope in their individual ways. However, when I read Jeremy’s frank, honest and detailed descriptions of what he was going through and how he and his wonderful wife, Catriona, were coping, I realised that I knew little of the personal journey of my patients. I saw the hospital side of terminal and palliative care, but Jeremy opened up the home truths as patients experience this disease. In many ways I wish I had received this lesson from a patient like Jeremy back at the start of my career. May he rest now in peace as this great work for us is over.

Alan Rodger
Glasgow

As a fellow sufferer from a complicated cancer, I have admired and sympathised with Jeremy Clarke. His cheerful endurance of its manifold discomforts: the stench of bed-linen soaked in chemically contaminated body sweat; the itching, nausea and absence of appetite; the erratic and discomforting bodily functions; the constant exhaustion, seldom relieved by anything approaching natural sleep; the endless round of medication; and the disturbances inflicted by the medical profession in their efforts at cure and containment. Then there was his compassion: his love for his grandsons and for his devoted wife. Jeremy, I salute you. May we meet in the next life.

Andrew Cook
Castagnola, Switzerland

What a marvellous obituary of Jeremy Clarke by David Goodhart (‘The reactionary bohemian’, 27 May). So rare to read an obituary by someone who clearly really knew and loved his subject. I wonder who the teacher was who recommended Decline and Fall and started Jeremy on his love of books. I remember a fairly raffish English teacher at my comprehensive in Essex in the 1970s drawing my attention to Waugh’s novel at a school summer fête. I had never heard of ‘her’ but was hooked, reading Waugh novels at one-night sittings.

I am sure many of us will miss Jeremy’s Low Life columns, and can only thank him for writing them, even as he lay dying.

David Ford
Saltaire, W. Yorks

One weekend before Christmas, Jeremy Clarke came to stay to witness the local hunt meet on my farm. Afterwards, a nearby pub rang to say I had won both a plastic Christmas tree and bottle of whisky. It was Jeremy’s kind if slightly eccentric way of saying thank you for the weekend. He had taken himself off and bought countless raffle tickets and put them in my name. I still have the tree.

Rory Knight Bruce
Crediton, Devon

I never met Jeremy Clarke but I felt I knew him better than some people I have known a lifetime. His column, which in latter years often dealt with his illness, was written with honesty yet with humour. What a brave man. I for one will miss him greatly. It was for his ability to express adversity without self-pity that I welled up when I learnt of his sad death.

Nick Symondson
Cheltenham

I never knew what Jeremy Clarke looked like, but thanks to Catriona’s impressive portrait I can now put a face to Jeremy’s impressive writings. Rest in peace Jeremy.

Deborah Swaine
Streat, E. Sussex

As a miserable reader and a 70-year-old hausfrau (but ex-nurse), I fell in love with Jeremy Clarke a few years ago through The Spectator (sorry, Catriona). His wit, sense of humour, knowledge, love of everything naughty – and of course of Catriona and his grandsons – left one with happiness, admiration and, finally, incredible disappointment that one would never have the chance to meet him.

To all the contributors in The Spectator who had that good fortune, you were all so lucky to have known such a remarkable man. What can one say, but how glad we all were to have him write in the magazine and enrich our lives every week.

Jane Elliott
West Sussex

I would like to express my deep condolences for the loss of Jeremy Clarke. He will be missed by so many, including his thousands of readers. Jeremy had a wonderful ability to write about male feelings in a wonderfully British way – wry, sardonic, humorous and, most of all, eloquent.

Charles Jenkins
By email

I read with enormous sadness of the death of Jeremy Clarke. No other writer of any magazine has come close to moving me as much as he did. The bravery and objectivity in describing his own decline and descent into the painful end game were simply extraordinary. In these rather unheroic times, he gave us an example of how to live through adversity, to write beautifully about one’s troubles without an iota of victimhood or self-pity, to retain a sense of humour and to get the most out of the worst of times. He was an example to us all and I, for one, will miss his columns very much.

James Noble
Lambourn, West Berkshire

Jeremy: you shared the bad times with us as well as the sunshine and we became your friends. We thank you and we shall miss you. A well-stocked bar and high-piled books surely await you. You deserve them.

Linda and Stephen Willby
Thornton le Dale, North Yorkshire

Into the bargain

Sir: Was the cost of investing military muscle into Ukraine worth it, Freddy Gray, Mark Galeotti and other commentators wondered last week (‘Ukraine’s next move’, 27 May). For its $70 billion and counting, both the hawks and Trumpeters in the US got something: a European Nato more likely to stand up for itself (and pay more for itself). They got a brand-new Nato member in Finland, whose border gives Russia another strategic dilemma, and a potential member in Ukraine, filled with experienced veterans.

Turkey has shown itself an arms maker of potency for better or worse, a Nato pin on the map’s southern flank. The threadbare German defence department was exposed to its own people, which can only be for the good. Oh, and everybody in the military industrial complex got to boost their future sales after testing their kit in a real war.

In the inevitable Taiwan skirmish to come, a beefed-up Nato shapes Russia’s stance as China’s ally. For what the West has spent so far, it’s cheap at twice the price.

Martin Hedges
Sudbury, Suffolk

Family time

Sir: Gus Carter’s article (‘Baby steps’, 27 May) struck a chord with me. Similarly to him, I have always wanted children, but approach my 30th birthday unmarried and childless. My mother was 30 at the time of my birth, and recently observed wistfully that she had always rather expected to be a grandmother by the time I reached that age; in my teens I had imagined starting a family in my twenties. Time has showed those hopes as unrealistic.

If there’s any one thing that gives me a feeling of alienation from my generation, it is that the most natural imaginable inclination to have children is considered merely a lifestyle choice – and an unpopular one at that. Meeting other young people who also want children is difficult; most are focused on careers, and regard children as an unwanted limitation on self-fulfilment. Those who do unequivocally want a family are treated as eccentric.

Gus Carter writes with some wariness of the increase in single individuals pursuing parenthood through surrogacy. Though many single parents have brought up children admirably, doubtless most people would agree a two-parent household is best for children. That said, if the desire for children continues to decline, thus rendering it ever more challenging for those who do want them to find partners, we can expect to see single individuals seeking surrogacy in ever-increasing proportions. What other choice have they got?

Garrett Warren
Tacoma, Washington state, USA

Zero efforts

Sir: Professor Hale (Letters, 27 May) doesn’t like Ross Clark’s view (regarding net zero) that Britain’s problem is an excess of ambition, arguing that we should ‘rise to the challenge of building the industries of the future’. But what are these industries? His observation that all the G7 countries are aiming to achieve net zero suggests he believes that the UK is falling behind. But the facts indicate otherwise. The Climate Action Tracker net-zero evaluations show that, of the G7 countries, only one (the UK) is doing better than ‘insufficient’. But the G7 is the source of only 22 per cent of global CO2 emissions and it’s notable that of the ten biggest emitters (the source of 69 per cent), none are doing better than ‘insufficient’ and seven are rated ‘highly’ or ‘critically insufficient’. It seems Ross may be right.

Robin Guenier
Hitchin, Hertfordshire

Post haste

Sir: Having just read Martin Vander Weyer’s piece about the Royal Mail, delivered a week late, I discussed the situation with our postman (Any other business, 20 May). He said the problem was lack of staff – four postmen had resigned from the local office in the last few weeks – and low pay, which made it difficult to recruit more. May I suggest to the new CEO that in this digital age, customers of Royal Mail would be satisfied with three deliveries a week, instead of six, provided the deliveries came on time? This would halve the need for postmen and their wages could be doubled.

Martin Down
Witney, Oxon

Five reigns

Sir: My father was born in 1872, fought in the Boer War, and was in his sixties when I, his only child, was born in 1932. At that age he was still hunting and riding in point-to-points and swam each morning in the North Sea. I am 91 and, like Lord Rennard’s mother-in-law, have seen three coronations (Letters, 20 May). I was taken in 1937 to a news cinema, Queen Elizabeth’s we watched on the specially bought TV, and King Charles’s also on television. Being the age I am, I have also lived during five reigns.

Anne Fisher
Thropton, Northumberland

The great John Hunter

Sir: In her review of the redesigned Hunterian Museum, Margaret Mitchell rehearses current criticisms of museum collections and their collectors, in this case the 18th-century surgeon John Hunter (Arts, 27 May). She might ask instead why an exhibition dedicated to a great figure in the history of anatomy and surgery requires any explanation or defence at all. Where is the problem, moral or academic, in being immersed in an intellectual world different from our own, based on objects Hunter bequeathed for that purpose? And why is it thought necessary to apply our standards to his collections?

Mitchell writes of ‘doomed Eurocentrism’. If this is being applied to Hunter, who was famous for his commitment to scientific experimentation, for teaching Edward Jenner, the pioneer of vaccination, and for seeking the expertise of other natural scientists, it is the reverse of the truth. He was a triumphant example of the methods of the European Enlightenment, from which the whole world continues to benefit.

Professor Lawrence Goldman
History Reclaimed (historyreclaimed.co.uk)

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