Remembering Anthony Blond

The publisher Gerard Noel pays tribute to his friend and author who died last week at the age of 79

One Friday evening in the early 1980s two brand-new, bright red cars roared up to my house in Gloucestershire. The drivers were Laura and Anthony Blond, my guests for a bank holiday weekend, who had clearly just had a rush of blood to the head in the showroom of their local Citroen dealer.

‘Don’t worry,’ I cooed as they reached the front door, ‘It’s only me here, so we are going to have a nice quiet weekend.’ ‘I hate it when people say that,’ snarled Anthony, as he pushed past me into the sitting room and started frantically to thumb his way through the local telephone directory in search of fresh blood. The result was a riot of impromptu visits to neighbours I never knew I had; indeed, apart from Friday dinner, every meal for the next three days was at somebody else’s house. Most of our hosts appeared to be delighted to see us; the glee of others was more measured (needless to say, Anthony got more of a kick out of gatecrashing the houses of the latter than the former).

I was neither offended nor surprised by this turn of events. By then I had grown quite used to Anthony’s exuberance, restlessness, appetite for society and chutzpah. Moreover, I had long since succumbed to the wit, charm, generosity, erudition and, above all, energy of this fiery gnome with his flashing black eyes and ferocious jaw.

Anthony had come into my life almost ten years earlier, when he fell violently for the 23-year-old pocket Venus Laura Hesketh, whose younger sister Smugs I was dating at the time.