Diamond - Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations

When one thinks of the pain John Diamond must have felt at leaving the world when his two children were so young, it seems almost tasteless to suggest that his departure before completing 'an uncomplimentary view of complementary medicine' as he dubbed his book was also a tragedy. But the editor in me, as opposed to the brother-in-law, certainly does see it as that. John's study on the day after his death presented an almost unbearably poignant sight: his computer screen still switched on, and there, flickering, as if with an extinguished intelligence, the last completed words of his book before he was rushed to hospital: 'Let me explain.' For once, he never did.

In that study, too, could be found almost every word that John had ever written, torn out of the myriad newspapers and magazines to which he had contributed, before cyberspace developed an easier means of retrieval. Six months before he died John wrote that he had rejected requests to set up a website devoted to his articles because 'I've always believed that journalism is an ephemeral thing and that if I want to write anything for posterity's sake, I'll start another unfinishable book.' But the sight of that pile of accumulated cuttings in the study suggested to Nigella and me that perhaps John would actually have relished seeing the best of it between covers: smarter than a mere website, in any event.

We are both grateful to Ze Wales and Sally Duncan for their help in collating all of John's journalism: he was the archetypal freelance, prepared to write about anything for anyone, so theirs was not an easy task. Actually, this was never mere hackery on his part. John had absorbed more information, both useful and useless, about a wider range of subjects, than any other journalist I came across. The Internet, fashion, cars, restaurants, television: on all these topics he at one time or another (and frequently simultaneously) had regular columns. John had an almost unerring sense of what the latest 'thing' would be in all these fields, and had a fierce desire to share his discoveries with as many people as possible. He was, for example, the first television critic to spot the peculiar talent of Sacha Baron-Cohen, languishing on the Paramount Comedy Channel, so that the readers of the Sunday Telegraph became the perhaps unlikely avant-garde fan club of the man who subsequently gained greater fame as Ali G.

I joined John Diamond's fan club in January 1989 when, showing a courage bordering on the reckless, he agreed to write a travel piece for the Spectator on Geneva, one of the most boring of the world's great cities. He turned this unfortunate fact into a piece of irresistible wit: 'Whole streets in the centre of town go bank, Rolex, bank, bank, Patek Philippe, bank, bank, Japanese electronics store, bank, bank, bank, Longines, greengrocer, Omega, bank, bank, bank.'

I remember ringing Nigella up, knowing that she was then a colleague of John's at the Sunday Times, to read out loud and share with her the only funny piece (so far as I know) ever to have been written about Geneva. I couldn't have been happier when, three months or so later, Nigella's office friendship with John turned into something much more precious.

John's gift of humour was certainly what I treasured most as one of his many editors he was writing five columns a week at the time of his death. He was, as his obituarists wrote, an incredibly witty man in private conversation (even when deprived of speech, and forced to scribble his repartee). But we all know writers who are outrageously witty in private, yet who struggle to realise that comic timing in their writing. Conversely, there are many very funny writers who in their real lives are models only of misanthropy. With John the wit was seamless, without force or contrivance. This remained true, right to the very end, even when he was in constant physical pain: you don't have to be Jewish, although, as they say, it helps, to be reduced to helpless laughter by his Jewish Chronicle swansong, a mock-Yiddisher version of 'Twas the week before Christmas'.

John's Jewishness was not just the wellspring of much of his sense of humour (if the Jews are a race, then irony is definitely its common language); it was also the object of his wit. His column in The Times contained some wonderful examples, none better than his account (included here) of a profoundly embarrassing trip to a Hasidim-run computer repair shop.

John's column in The Times became, I suppose, his public memorial, with its frequently (and deliberately) poignant account of the havoc wrought by a smoking-induced tumour. It was the intensely personal tone of these columns which clearly captured the attention of so many readers. But their strength, it seems to me (and to many doctors as well, to judge from the letters sent in at the time of John's death), rests in large part with his absolute determination to understand the true nature of his disease, and to communicate that, rather than mere emotion, to his readers. John's family background his father had been a bio-chemist obviously helped, but this was also characteristic of him as a writer: unlike so many prolific and gifted columnists he never allowed himself to run on a tank full only of treasured prejudices. He certainly had those, too, but above all he was an empirical writer, obsessed, as all seekers of truth are, with facts, facts, facts. Readers rather enjoy that, by the way: on the whole, that's why people buy newspapers.