The winter interregnum

Nothing has happened on the book other than my drafting a forward, which is a bit like buying the 45s before buying the record player (dated reference but apposite in an era when vinyl is in the ascendant – like the Ryan Gosling character in the wonderful La La Land, I am as I type listening to a jazz LP, Wynford Marsalis’s debut album to be precise – how on earth did he get Miles’s sidemen, including Herbie Hancock, to play on it?!). In my blog entries over the past two years I have made only oblique reference to the reason why this project has moved forwards in fits and starts. There is no cause to do so any longer – from January 2015 our son, Adam, was terminally ill; and sadly he died just before Christmas. Not surprisingly, writing about Richard Fairey has not been a priority. The Guardian online contains an obituary of Adam, which hopefully will appear in the actual newspaper [http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/13/adam-smith-obituary]. Almost a month has passed since Adam’s death, and the grieving continues, but sooner rather than later I’ll embark on the penultimate chapter, while at the same time concluding my review of the previous chapters with Jane Tennant. Once forward/acknowledgements and concluding chapter are written then the complete draft will be read by a relative of Jane’s whose knowledge of aviation means he can OK or correct technical detail in the book. While the aerospace expert is reading the book, I’ll review family film material now on DVD to see if it contains any information I might want to feed into what is a penultimate iteration. The book will then be ready for the copy editor, and for me to carry out the necessary selection of photographs. But all this depends upon my writing the chapter on Fairey 1945-56, and that in turn depends upon me – at least to a degree – coming to terms with the loss of our darling boy.