Jake, my father.

(I wrote and posted the below on Facebook on 25 Jan, and am bringing all my various scribblings together under one roof at last!)
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Jake Stratton-Kent: 27/04/1956–17/01/2023. RIP.

There are hundreds of obituaries and busy hashtags out there for dad right now.

It is quite overwhelming. I am in turns super proud and then just wanting to close the door on the world, bring him a pot of tea and laugh together about the madness ‘out there’. Talk about music, anecdotes, our almost perfectly-aligned Political filter bubble (nothing so life affirming as having, and constantly reaffirming together, the same political values as your patriarch!)

Rightly, there’s not much place for domestic or deoxyribonucleic obituary for such a man. That obituary will remain within me.

This one linked here though is very much one of my favourites because it gives readers more of a picture of the man himself, and some of the other aspects of his self that get less airtime. Content Warning: The obituary in the link below isn’t reading material I’d recommend to those more, shall we say, genteel or conventional of readers.

It is not complete, but his more private side occluded much from complete understanding, so that nobody, not even he perhaps, could offer a truly complete biography.

Anyone who tried to immortalise him in biography, would I think draw criticism, someone else thinking them wrong…