Nick Booth

Nick Booth, whose funeral is in on Thursday 21 September, 1:40pm at Kingston Cemetery (with a wake following, from 2:30-5:00, at The Old Cranleighan Sports Club, Portsmouth Road, Thames Ditton KT7 OHB) and whose family, have said friends are welcome, was a remarkable man.

It is long since I was dislocated from Kingston, and my life and friends there, among whom Nick arrived with his joie de vivre, his surreal wit, and his have-a-go, sporting temperament, and found himself at home.

He personified the maxim that the frame of a man is not the judge of his character. He could seem a big, awkward man. Then you would find, if you spent only a little time with him, that he was rather bold and jolly. You would find how much he loved to tease pompousness and pretence. Yet he did this with such warmth and such surreal humour, that he didn't prick people's egos but welcomed them to deflate their egos themselves. He would as readily tickle discomfort and encourage camaraderie.

His humour was so bonkers that it subverted all and all, like a surrealist Tommy Cooper, as he was in many ways. I seem to remember him doing impersonations. Mostly I remember him trying to tease his way through the shell within which I hid when in company. 'Mark', he would say and, having gained my attention, he would raise his finger and open his mouth as though to say something significant, then nothing more would come. Or he would simply say, "Aha!". Or he would say something like, 'You're a punk!', and thrust his finger at you with a warm smile, as an old associate recounted on LinkedIn. I'm not sure I ever saw him without a smile somewhere on his face. When he was not fooling with me he was being generous with his ideas and observations, and his care.

Despite his dedication to serious journalism, and the long and productive career he had doing it, good humour was his abiding principle, in all things.

It became known to me only after he had died that he had a cult following among public relations agencies, to whom he had been for years sent spoof requests for information and interviews with their business clients, through the Response Source bulletin service. The story that his old colleague Chris Middleton recounted about his interview for a job on Network Reseller when Nick was editor there evokes Nick's character charmingly. Nick's old chum Bas told me that he had joked very recently that he got kicked out of his hospice where he had been receiving respite care for his cancer, because they got fed up with him abusing their hospitality, and because he kept asking for bed baths.

Football was another area where his apparently awkward frame belied his nature. It was through football that we became friends. In a football jersey, he had the hunched frame of a Monster Munch Monster: enormous in his jersey, and far below, legs, and then finally his little elven feet in their magic boots. When he played, his arms pointed this way and that, and his feet would dance the ball off in another direction. He would enjoy a beer after the game, and then cycle off on his little, single-gear bicycle, a harmonious orchestration of improbabilities. Rest in peace, twinkle toes.