Douglas Hamilton

For all the sorrow associated with Doug Hamilton's untimely death, I hope we can celebrate him as someone who went out doing what he always seemed to do with his life – living it to the full. After all, most of us get to say that we try to keep fit, or swim at the local pool. But Doug? He took a daily dip in the Med. Doug was among a group of recruits who joined Reuters over several months in 1982 when a long hiring freeze was lifted. Slightly older than the other newcomers, he was always a little more elegantly dressed than the other men among us, worldlier in interpreting the great issues of the day, more at ease in understanding the muttered instructions of the veterans on the World Desk.

The smokers among us sucked on cigarettes while Doug enjoyed cigars. We slurped down warm beer in Mrs Moon’s while he sipped on the finest scotch. And while we went off on our first foreign postings and broke the bank to buy a second hand car or a small set of wheels, Doug treated himself to a brand new Mercedes sedan as soon as he got to Bonn. Doug lived life with all the panache, joy and style that graced his wonderful writing, as Crispian Balmer so elegantly describes in his observant obituary. Doug could be a curmudgeon, of course, as Crispian also notes, but that is because Doug loved life and the people fortunate to know him so much that good was never good enough. For Doug, there could only be the best. And he was among the best. ■