Preface
Everybody seems to have been in love with Tom Stoppard, and I make no claim to have been an exception. In my case, it all started over 40 years before I met him, as a result of seeing a performance of Jumpers in 1972 when I was 16. A succession of visits to his other and later plays followed over the ensuing decades. If from them I single out Arcadia, which I saw repeatedly, it is because I think it to be about the nearest thing to a perfect play.
As a devoted fan, I could therefore barely conceal my excitement when about 12 years ago he became a near-ish neighbour in the country. Thereafter I occasionally glimpsed him about the place but resisted the urge (unlike the Hugh Grant character’s sister in Notting Hill) to accost him with the assurance that we could be great friends did he but know it. Eventually, we met by chance at a party, and we talked and talked. That was indeed the beginning of a deep friendship. Over the next decade, I saw more of him than any other friend, and we spoke by telephone and exchanged messages constantly. A blessing of this sort happens rarely in anyone’s lifetime, and to have found myself in such close contact and mutual sympathy with a long-standing idol has been a piece of good fortune, at which – looking back – I can only shake my head in disbelief tempered by gratitude. I treasure the dozens of voicemails which I have kept, and the texts – all preserved – which ran into the thousands; cards and letters by the score too. We had a sort of two-man book club, each of us constantly recommending books to the other and then discussing them in person or otherwise. London’s best bookshop Sandoe’s became rather bemused as we took it in turns to phone in with orders for volumes on all sorts of subjects to be dispatched to the other up the road (in fact about 7 miles away) in Dorset.
Our friendship traversed the consequences of Brexit, the challenge of Covid, and in due course the sorrows of bereavement. We talked of cricket and country life as well as philosophy, science and the arts; he seemed as interested in the law as I was in the theatre. But it ended, as it was always likely to, with my having to say goodbye to him, as the world had to, in November 2025. The writing of this piece was part of the self-administered therapy which followed that gentle farewell.
Tom’s helpfulness to others was legendary; the present essay is one of the few on this website which has not benefited from his editorial oversight.