Jan King

I’m sorry I won’t be there to see Bob returned to the earth although it enables me to think he lives on, a call away, the occasional visit to Suffolk, an email.

I’d known Bob for around 12 years, we were introduced to work on a short film about drug use in Barnet.  What a gift for me to find such a talented, creative and generous film maker to learn from. We struck up a friendship as Bob clearly did with so many people he encountered; he noticed things in people, he was excited and charmed by them – his photographer’s eye finding and stimulating things in people that brought a delicious rapport.

Although we were nearly 20 years apart in age we found we had been brought up about a Herculean arm stone’s throw away from each other, he in Nuneaton, me in Hinckley.  Beautifully ordinary Midlands’ towns.  He was certainly a man of his time and the people, place and times that nurtured him were extraordinary in enabling his curiosity and talents to have a role in the world.  For me he had a big impact through the films he made, going to dusty and neglected places and amplifying the voices and lives he found there.   I now need to find some of the films he made as a desperate way of staying connected.

I have a striking photograph he took in Sierra Leone – a young woman looking boldly at him.  What was it about Bob that enabled this.  He tapped into a vitality in people that was unbothered by worries, politics and class – I got a sense from the first day we spent together on a notorious estate in Barnet that he delighted in the ordinary in life but somehow found something essential, vital and energising within it.  People must have responded to this wherever he went and they shared something that transcends cultures, age and wealth.

In more recent years I worried about him and his health.  I worried about his breathing, his drinking, the smoking but I loved the way the last time I saw him in the summer he sent me away with a recipe for some green gloopy de-tox concoction which he swore by.  He was planning another detox trip to Thailand and he had plans and projects on the go.  Like all trips to Bob I went away with a new zest for something I had put aside or didn’t know was there and of course a reading list.

So Bob, thanks.  You have been the best thing any of us can be, a good friend.  I hope I can take some of your energy and zest and create some of the buzz you did with it.  Meanwhile the gloopy de-tox drink can wait awhile and I’ll raise a glass of Malbec to you on Wednesday.

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