Even before I had begun to cast about for this week’s topic, it was unhappily thrust upon me, and therefore on you, with the shocking news of the sudden death of a very dear friend, Andrew Seth, in England. Andrew was, indeed, the closest of my surviving friends from my wonderful years in Oxford (1958-1961). I have written about him on this page several times, and indeed recently. I have even posted a couple of blog essays from Saint Michel, the Seths’ delightful old house in the hills skirting the small old town of Salernes in the upper Var. Spending a generous stretch of September there in a serious gastronomic and conversational orgy with Andrew and his partner Lee, in the company also of other old friends from decades past, had become for us an annual highpoint of our senior years. So there are no glad tidings in this blog and practically no glad teaching; but I cram a linguistic point in at the end.
Andrew’s importance in the British commercial world, which saw him in prominent positions in various parts of the world and heading the British branch of a large international conglomerate, will guarantee ample obituary notices in the British press. What follows is in no sense a biography, merely the first thoughts of a grieving friend. Andrew and his late wife Edith, also a good friend, came from Belfast. Andrew’s father was a prominent professor of psychology at the university there. I would meet Andrew in the autumn of 1958 at Jesus College, Oxford. He was a lawyer—meaning a student of law as an undergraduate Oxford subject—and our rapidly established friendship had little to do with the academic side of life. Young Andrew was in fact a bit of a rogue. But he was brilliant, knowledgeable, a great wit and the kind of fellow whose broad popularity soon guaranteed his election to the presidency of the Junior Common Room. Yet eventually he could not conceal, nor particularly desired to conceal, a broad-based and usefully focused knowledge of literature, music, and politics. Some of our undergraduate highjinks were of the kind that cannot be recalled without a certain amount of embarrassment, but I was never unaware of his broad intellectual interests or the passion with which he pursued them. What I did not know is that our rather casually shared “serious” interests would be the basis of our own life-long and gradually intensifying friendship.
The academic world into which I fully submerged myself after leaving Oxford tends to become narrow and exclusive in its academic character. I had the good luck to have a few real world friends doing real world things. Very slowly, but also with a pleasant inexorability, Andrew became the greatest of such friends to me. He and lovely Edith raised four remarkable and versatile sons. Andrew rose—not without testing adversities—to the high roles of professional leadership that allowed him in time a country house and a property in the south of France—magnificent, but not fancy, if you understand the distinction. Edith, alas, was taken away, far too early, by a bad cancer. Well, I suppose there are no good cancers. We grieved for and with Andrew, but were delighted when in later years he connected with Lee, the surviving widow in a couple with whom the Seths had once shared a long friendship and French vacations. We soon came to know and love her, as did Andrew’s offspring. She was with Andrew at the sudden end, and we are grieving with her even as we admire her deep strength of character.
The only newspaper photograph I could find of Andrew on the Internet is a rather somber one. I believe it must have appeared in the British press to accompany his solicited expert opinion regarding the “grocery wars” periodically waged among the supermarketeers in the Continental European countries and in Britain. As I learned from him in conversation, the highly volatile large-scale market in domestic table food is a huge and treacherous one where small margins mark the divisions between lucre and loss. With his late long-time friend Buff Randall, another Jesus College contemporary, he had co-authored a book called The Grocers: the Rise and Rise of Supermarket Chains (2011). Fortunately, we had more recent photos, taken by us in Salernes about six months ago. Of the two I have chosen is one memorializing what were literally the last moments we would spend on this earth in the company of this dear friend. Squinting into the brilliantly rising Provençal sun we lined up together for a staged farewell photo. Behind us is the car that would take us to Nice airport. The driver of that car is the one who took the picture. We were sad to be leaving such beautiful friends and such a beautiful place, but the last thing in our minds was that the farewell might be final. Indeed: in the midst of life, we are in death.
Some friendships are great multipliers of friendship. During our autumnal stays at Saint Michel we met and became friends with other of Andrew’s friends, or increased the friendship with others whom we already knew. One new friend, Alison Loyd, has known him well for sixty years. They worked closely together in his first job after leaving Oxford. In a lovely letter in which she commiserated with us, she summarized the essence of our shared Salernes idylls thus: “Above all, Andrew loved conversation and we were all the beneficiaries of his wide reading, broad interests, enquiring intellect, listening skills and decisive mind, alongside wit and humour.” Another member of this year’s house party, our shared Oxford friend Michael Nicholas and one of the most prominent church musicians in England, will probably be the organist at Andrew’s funeral.
Naturally, very old friends often preserve between them long superannuated “in” jokes, the shelf-life of which expired decades earlier , adding further absurdity to the absurdities of discourse characteristic of class reunions or accidental meetings with the old girl-friend you last saw forty years ago. One such bit of humor, a tedious “in” joke, involved the words for a meal’s final course--dessert (American) and (sweet) often English. Andrew would occasionally ask me “How would you like a Fresh fruit, juice, jelly, cream and ice cream to top things off?” This referred, obscurely, to an offering to be had in the prix-fixe menu (three shillings and sixpence, as I recall) on offer at a modest café in the little village of Iffley where he and other memorable friends lived for a year when room had to be made in the college buildings on the Turl to give incoming students their chance to dwell among forehead-smashing lintels and gargoyled façades. A mixture of fresh fruit, juice, jelly (Jello in our land), cream, and ice cream were presumably the contents of this mouth-watering concoction, but also its name. The waitress would cut no corners. This course could not be referred to in less than ten syllables. Andrew and his flat-mates derived mirth from this habit of speech, And note that it was not “fresh fruit juice” but two different items: a fresh fruit (to be determined) and a juice (likewise) that might or might not be a relative of the juice. In Mencken’s still wonderful American Language (1919) the author points out the typical way in which the British usage with regard to the names of comestibles and potables differs (or used to differ) from the American. An Englishman prepares a drink composed of Scotch whiskey (or even whisky) and soda water and calls it what? A whiskey-and-soda, of course. His American counterpart needs poetry. His identical drink had to be a high ball at the very least and quite possibly a Caledonian Comforter or something more exotic. I doubt that anyone in the world still asks for a high ball. And I am a certain that never again will anyone in this world be offered this ten-syllable sweet course. One minute loss amid a great personal one. Andrew Seth, 1937-2024. May he rest in peace in rise in glory.
