Annie Nightingale, Steve Wright, Ian Lavender, Barry John, JPR and now Dave Myers. All gone in 2024. All too young to slip off the mortal coil. All brought smiles to our faces. They were in the business of playing out their passions in front of us and using their talents – in some cases truly God given – to make the rest of us feel better about ourselves. Their vehicles for our pleasure were music, sport, drama, comedy and cookery but their real talent was their simple connection with the people. We trusted these public people, we felt somehow that they represented us in taste, in values, in our collective ordinariness.
Dave Myers, so recently departed, was a wonderful mate to Si King – and all of us. A ragged non-Hell’s Angel with a childlike enthusiasm for food and travel and people. Si has lost his happy right arm. We have lost a wholesome, funny contributor to our tetchy world. When the Dave Myerses of our lives leave us our loss isn’t the recipes we’ll never make or the journeys we won’t share with the bikers; it’s the pleasure of his ( and Si’s) friendship, the joy of their passion.
I couldn’t quite bring myself to write about the death of my great sporting hero, Bobby Charlton, last year. Too much to capture in too small a space. But he was so much more than what made his name. He was an inspiration, a role model and such a decent man. Set against the legacy that many of those who currently lead our public institutions or spout inanities across the media, it is little wonder that when we wake to hear that a footballer or a disc jokey or an actor has died, we mourn their passing rather profoundly. Another man or woman who made us smile, who had integrity, has gone. Sad.
simplysorro 