Geoff Nicholson RIP

Obituary

When I was clearing out books for a house move at the end of last year I had to make some difficult decisions about which to keep and which send to charity shops. No matter how many I had to lose there was no suggestion that my two dozen or so Geoff Nicholson books would be among them. That total includes all his 17 novels (some of them published by @mikethep ), and a selection of non-fiction, often on the theme of walking with nods to psychogeography.

The best of his novels were satirical, multi-faceted explorations of obsession, combining multiple narratives. The obsession could be food, or Volkswagens, or foot fetishism. They are very funny, but reward repeat reading in the way few comic novels do. If you want to explore his fiction I would suggest Everything and More or Bleeding London as starting points.

I never met Geoff, though in recent years he lived just one train stop away from me in Manningtree, but I was delighted to accept a Facebook friend invitation from him after I commented on his posts. It always gave me a thrill when he liked or commented on something on my feed, most recently a week before his death. His own FB page, as well as his blogs The Hollywood Walker and Psychogourmet, displayed the same relish for life and oddity which made his books so compelling.

I knew from press interviews and the like that he had a rare form of leukaemia (‘Though from my point of view not rare enough’, he observed with typical dryness) but understood it was manageable if not curable. None of his recent writing gave away how ill he was. His enthusiasm and sheer, indistinguishable Interest in the world around him deserted him.

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