Searching for life

A tribute to my late friend Gareth Smyth – I should have chased him up sooner

How many unanswered emails should it take to prompt a proof-of-life Google query? In my case, it was two – albeit a year apart.

I wrote to my friend Gareth Smyth thirteen months ago, asking if he would be amenable to a visit should my imagined road trip traverse his corner of the west of Ireland? My plans changed, so I didn’t follow up. Then last week, he apparently ignored an email on a subject that we had discussed frequently. No answer again, so I searched ‘Gareth Smyth Mayo’. 

That provided notice of his death, of a memorial event at St Brides, and an obituary in The Guardian – from two and a half years ago. It leaves me bereft, both for the loss of someone for whom I cared deeply, and for having for so long been in the dark.

Our paths first crossed in the late 1980s. I was an editor at Marxism Today, the iconoclastic magazine that had spun out of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was employed to run a campaign group promoting electoral reform to the left. Together we edited a 16-page supplement to the magazine on the issues and likely consequences of the various systems of proportional representation.

We were united by our trade, but also the relatively unusual quality of having been involved in party politics. He had been a councillor in Camden during one of that borough’s most combustible eras. I was a one-time activist who had worked briefly as a Labour speech writer.

We were close throughout the 1990s – at times having four or five long telephone conversations a week. We worked on stories together, critiqued each others work, and stayed in each other’s homes. Then our lives span in different directions, his to Beirut and Tehran for the FT, mine to more prosaic roles at The Sunday Times. We continued to meet when circumstances allowed. Whenever we did, it was to take up a conversation as though we had spoken earlier in the day.

So far as I am aware, Gareth never really embraced the digital age. He had no personal website, nor social media presence, that I know of. That is a shame, as I would love to read again some of his writing. Among the real highlights was a fishing trip he took with Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin, years before the Good Friday Agreement brought him into the ‘constitutionalist’ fold. He also allowed me to read the manuscript of a well-researched book about UK electoral fraud that he wrote in the 1990s. It was a tremendous read, but was perhaps a victim of legal challenges. 

Now I must continue our exchanges in my imagination, without his insights into music, poetry, novels and always, always politics. Conversations will be much the poorer, but they are my only chance to honour a dear friend gone far too soon.

The moral of this tale? Call an old mucker today – much better to chat now than to learn from a search engine that you have left it too late.