Mark Birley: a man who was right in everything

We had arranged to see Mark Birley at noon on the day he died. But my wife Lucy and I were just too late. He had suffered a stroke that morning. We missed him by a couple of hours and now, forever. I heard confirmation of the terrible news as I boarded a plane for Hong Kong. Not a good time to be pensive, as stewardess after stewardess interrupted my memories of the man with silly patters and wash-bags and pyjamas. Mark would have appreciated the incongruities. He had a Saharan sense of humour, especially when travelling on commercial. Even when he was confined to a converted bedroom on the ground floor of his divine house opposite the Brompton Oratory, he remained funny. I had asked him where he was going for Christmas.

‘I am going home,’ he announced.

‘But Mark, this is your home,’ I said, not letting him get away with being either silly or Alzheimeric.

‘No, I am going home,’ he insisted.

‘Look, Mark,’ I persisted, pointing out of the window. ‘You see the garden out there. That’s your garden. This is your home.’

He then triumphed with a classic: ‘Nobody tells me anything anymore!’

I could only laugh. And laughter was what I shared a lot of with Birley. We would meet regularly. When he was fit (and I often saw him pumping iron at the Bath and Racquets), we would always lunch at Mark’s or Harry’s or George. And we would tell endless jokes and poke fun at the maximum number of friends we had. He never went anywhere else. He simply wasn’t interested in anything outside of his Mayfair quintuplet. When Nicky Kerman eventually got him to lunch at his new Mirabelle, Mark brought along his largest Alsatian, because he knew Kerman, in his bourgeois sense of hygiene, would not allow a dog.