David Nicholson

I have fond memories of talking on the phone to David in the evening from various places in Europe where I was covering stories. Some editors on the World Desk were tense and curt to the point of being impolite when taking a call from me on a story that needed further discussion. Not so David. He was calm and, apart from tackling whatever the problem might have been, was ready to share a joke. I only joined Reuters in early 1989, in Bonn, West Germany, from UPI so I did not know David that long. But I particularly remember one late night in a hotel room in Tirana in the spring of 1999 when NATO had started bombing Belgrade. I could hear the bomb planes flying high in the sky and there seemed to be more of them on this particular night. It was around midnight and I phoned the World Desk to let people on the desk know this observation of mine; it wasn’t worth a story on its own. I got David on the line and told him. I also happened to have a moment of melancholy and loneliness, away from family in an odd place, which foreign correspondents sometimes experience. David lent a sympathetic ear to my troubles in his trademark avuncular, jovial way and I went to sleep afterwards feeling better. ■