Roddy Lumsden is Dead

To be precise, Roddy Lumsden has been dead for three years on this day (January 10th). It seems hard to believe, because for a good part of those three years, we have lived through a global pandemic and various forms of lockdown…all of which has produced a concertina of time. It can be startling, those rare moments when the bellows expand and we realise just how many days have passed us by. And given Roddy died just as reports of a new disease in Wuhan began to filter out to the world, for those of us who knew him, his passing marks the beginning of what became a shared nightmare. Indeed his funeral, on a windswept February day in Honor Oak, would prove to be the last occasion many people in the poetry world would see each other in person for a very long time.

I delivered a eulogy at the funeral, later published in Poetry News, the text of which I reproduce below. I’ve since published a sequence of poems as an elegy, and even revisited a lyric by the eighth-century Chinese poet Du Fu, with Roddy in mind. Most recently, I found remembering my early days in London with Roddy formed a route into writing an essay on Black British poetry. And now I am writing another piece of prose which seeks to explore the complex legacy Roddy has left us. I suspect the motive behind all of this is to reassert my own relationship to a figure who proved formative to so many British poets. I say that because Roddy and I were estranged for many years, and Roddy is both a reason why I stopped writing poetry as a young man  – and a reason why I came back to poetry upon turning forty.

One of the very first poems I published upon returning, a poem in Scots taken by The Dark Horse in 2016, was a coded lament for the end of our friendship. That poem also, and this somewhat haunts me, foreshadowed what was to happen to Roddy in the years to come. I am glad we had a reconciliation of sorts, when he moved into a nursing home, and that I also saw him a couple of weeks before he died. But I never told him I had come back to writing poems. It was the right decision, as Roddy was leaving poetry behind by the time we spoke again, but this too somewhat haunts me. And so here I am, putting up some words to remember the fact that three years on, Roddy Lumsden is Dead.

***

Hello everyone.

As a trustee of The Poetry Society, can I just begin by expressing the Society’s condolences and offering our appreciation for Roddy’s work with us over many years, including a tenure as the charity’s Vice Chair.

I’m here to say a little about Roddy Lumsden when he first came to London. I knew Roddy, and his then-partner Sinéad, through the university poetry scene at Edinburgh. But I really became friends with Roddy because we came down to London from Scotland at roughly the same time. Roddy moved to London at the beginning of 1998.

There’s something about being Scottish and heading down south to make your way in London. From Auld Reekie to the Big Smoke. Anyway, it bonded us and for many years after that we were inseparable.

Poetry was Roddy’s vocation and he lived it utterly. Too much, sadly, but I am not sure Roddy had much choice in the matter. Poetry was his everything.

So Roddy was a poet. And a teacher and an editor and a champion of young poets. Some of them are here right now. He touched many lives.

As my wife Kathryn says, it always rains for the poets and it certainly rained hard in the days after Roddy Lumsden passed.

It also rained very hard yesterday. Storm Roddy. I should just briefly mention some people who wanted to attend today but were prevented from doing so by the weather. Neil Astley, Roddy’s publisher and editor. Niall Campbell, his literary executor. And two of Roddy’s oldest friends, Mark Reed and Neil Cooper.

Here is one memory I keep coming back to. Perhaps because it was so atypical of Roddy. Perhaps also, because it speaks to my relationship with Roddy in other ways.

I remember not long after coming to London, being in Holborn Tube station and travelling down the escalator in the middle of the day…the very long escalator in Holborn. Roddy, with his endless repository of trivia, would tell us now it is the second tallest escalator on the London Underground, after the Angel.

I was the only person travelling down this vertiginous escalator and there was only one person travelling up. And that person was Roddy. And Roddy was wearing a suit. Yes, a suit. Not many of us ever saw Roddy in his suit.

So we recognised each other and had to do that thing where one person rushes back the way on the escalator so we could talk. There was a wordless agreement as we passed each other. Roddy being Roddy, he was the person who would stay put. I would be the person who headed back up the escalator to speak with him.

It turned out Roddy was wearing his suit because he was being interviewed for a job as...an office temp.

Roddy was a temp for the agency OFFICE ANGELS.

Imagine being a harassed middle manager in some dreadful firm, juggling people pulling sickies and stressed resignations, and Roddy Lumsden suddenly descends upon reception: your very own designated OFFICE ANGEL.

As an OFFICE ANGEL, Roddy mostly did data entry jobs. And Roddy—being so bright, and given how his brain worked—used to finish his quota of data entry within the first hour or so of working. These were the days of limited internet access. So the rest of the time, Roddy told me, he’d play the game Minesweeper on his computer.

Needless to say, it was a very short affair…Roddy and temping and OFFICE ANGELS.

Roddy was a poet, not an office worker. Poetry, as I say, was his everything.

So farewell, Roddy Lumsden. Roddy the poet. Roddy the OFFICE ANGEL.

Roddy riding high, on the escalator.

Farewell.