I was lucky enough to meet the Discworld author, one of my greatest heroes, towards the end of his life.
There are a few moments in your life that really change things. They're not always obvious at the time, but when you reassess them later on it's obvious: That's where my life went down this particular path. For me, quite a few of those moments have been the moment I picked up certain books.
One of those books was The Colour of Magic, the first book in Terry Pratchett's great Discworld series. A friend gave me his copy in 1991, in Miss Shepard's class. I was in year 6. I was a geeky kid; I'd read The Lord of the Rings and Michael Moorcock and all of those things. Terry Pratchett took all of those things, and made them funny.
It changed my life by showing me how to write. Pratchett himself said he'd learned irony and humour by reading Richmal Crompton, Jerome K. Jerome, P.G. Wodehouse, and all the great English humourists of the first half of the 20th century. I wouldn't pretend to be a 10th of the writer he was, but whatever there is that's good in my writing owes a lot to him. He distilled three great strands of British writing – fantasy, sharp satire, and gentle humour – and made his own, beautiful mash-up.
Funnily enough, I wouldn't put The Colour of Magic, now, among my favourite Pratchett novels. He did wonderful things in it, but he hadn't learned his craft, sharpened his tools. The best ones were in his glorious middle period: They were wise, they were savage, they were moving, they said important things. He was a novelist who had it all.
Pool New / Reuters
About 18 months ago, I was lucky enough to interview him for The Telegraph. I knew he had been ill, obviously, but I'd read interviews with him, and they seemed to say that while the posterior cortical atrophy he suffered from – a form of Alzheimer's disease – was affecting his visual ability and his coordination, his mind was as sharp as ever. That wasn't quite true, I was sad to discover, but he was still wise and funny and full of insight. He was also fun. The first thing he did when he rocked up in the hotel room I was waiting in was to order two large chilli mojitos. I was so nervous at meeting an idol that I spilled some in my sock.
The one thing he said then that I think we ought to remember now is this: He wanted to die at a time of his own choosing, and he wanted to do so in his garden, drinking a glass of excellent brandy and listening to Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium.
Corgi
During that interview he mentioned a documentary he'd taken part in about the right to die. It followed a man, Peter Smedley, who went to Switzerland for assisted suicide. “Frankly, Mr Smedley would probably be with us now, if he hadn’t had to go to Switzerland to do it," Pratchett said.
Maybe it feels too soon to say this; maybe it's ghoulish, I don't know. But I do know that it would feel dishonest, on the day of Pratchett's death, not to talk about what he wanted from his death. I hope he got it. But I know that he would want someone to point out that the laws in this country make it less likely that he did.
Anyway. Thank you, Sir Terry, for the last 24 years of my life. They would have been very different, and nowhere near as good, if it weren't for you.
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When I Met Sir Terry Pratchett