My 2019: mice, Marrakesh and a fond farewell to my dear friend Christopher Booker

Another year over and it wasn’t all bad, you know. Here are some of my personal highlights.

Best birthday parties: my dear old friend Liz Hogg’s 90th and my dear older friend’s Jim Lovelock’s 100th. The latter, in the Orangerie at Blenheim Palace, was possibly the most unboring semi-formal social occasion I’ve ever attended. My table included the philosopher John Gray, a dapper Japanese gentleman who had been blown out of his bed by the Hiroshima bomb, and an economist from northern Uganda who’d narrowly escaped the Lord’s Resistance Army massacres. For her PhD, she had delighted in triggering her thesis supervisors by arguing that western aid programmes don’t work. Jim Lovelock is one of the most extra-ordinary people I have ever met: a free spirit, always eager for new ideas, beholden to nobody, loving life. I’m sure that’s one of the three reasons why he has thrived to such a ripe old age — the others being his amazing wife Sandy and his unlikely Inuit genetic stock. (Apparently Baffin Bay Eskimos would sometimes be recruited by whalers when they’d lost crew members.)

Best send-off: Christopher Booker’s funeral. Barely a day goes by when I don’t find myself wishing my honorary dad were still here, so we could dissect the idiocies of the day in one of those rambling phone chats, which invariably began with the Booker’s tar-weathered voice booming ‘Dellers!’ Cancer gave him sufficient time to choreograph his own funeral perfectly, with the best music and hymns, the choicest readings, the most eclectic guest list ranging from eco-warriors like Hugh Fearnley–Whittingstall to reactionary curmudgeons like Peter Hitchens. God repaid all those years the Booker had served as a churchwarden by giving him a glorious sunny day for the funeral.

Luckiest escape: As I was retreating in order to get a better shot with my iPhone of an architectural feature in Le Jardin Secret in Marrakesh, the ground disappeared from under me — just like it did once before when I broke my leg plunging into a ha-ha in the dark at a wedding — and I found myself falling backwards into space and an almost inevitable grim rendezvous with the fracture clinic in a Moroccan hospital.