One Year On

March 23 last year was not a good day for venturing outdoors in the South-East. I had told my colleague to arrive early, much earlier than he came when we were working together at my place a few years ago.

He turned up in good time, and in due course we set off down Venner Road for Sydenham station. I had kept him in the dark until then.

As we walked I said to him “We’re going to visit a mutual acquaintance”.

“Who?” he asked.

“Goodman” I said.

I didn’t look at his face but pointed out that I had a print-out of the position of Ted’s grave in Redstone Cemetery.

We travelled to Redhill then took a taxi from there. We had been here on February 9 to visit Ted on his deathbed. It was an experience I found very distressing, but Mark took it in his stride. He was the same when with some difficulty we found the freshly dug grave, but I suppose I should have expected nothing less from a man who says he is leaving his own body to medical science.

He was equally unperturbed about missing the funeral. I had known Ted for thirty years. Mark had known him for forty years. This counted for nothing.

Luckily, the weather held, it was more occasional drizzle than rain. Afterwards, we ate at a fish bar then parted company somewhere between Redhill and Sydenham, East Croydon if my memory serves me correctly.

It takes around 18 months for a grave to settle sufficiently for a headstone to be erected. I presume Ted will have one at some point; if I am both alive and at liberty, I will visit the cemetery then.

I still have a good few anecdotes I could relate about Ted, this one resulted in me being slandered by a certifiable lunatic. When he was still working for Gans & Co, he and another solicitor were approached by a woman who was looking for a legal consultant. They visited her office, and after assessing the operation, Ted made his excuses and left, advising his colleague to have no further contact with her.

She goes by Professor Alexia Thomas, and for whatever reason, at least two newspapers in her native Nigeria have given her space over the years. Here is one sample.

She was running something called the Independent Diplomat Commission; her website is gone but her YouTube channel is extant although it has not been updated for six years.

According to Ted, she was a mother of four and had accused her husband of abuse –let’s say no more than that. There had been a civil case in which he had been granted custody of their offspring. How she came to be in Britain remains to be seen, as does the source of her funding, but she had been selling worthless documents to her fellow Nigerians. The courts had been made aware of this and some sort of circular had been issued to that effect. She had eventually ended up in very deep water for giving immigration advice illegally.

In August 2010, she appeared at Southwark Crown Court where she was convicted under her real name, Lizzy Henz, and given an 18 month sentence, but on appeal, this sentence was revoked and she was sent to a loony bin. That did not deter her however, and when I exposed her, this is what she wrote about me.

She is right when she says this country is now (virtually) a police state, but that is as far as it goes. The website to which she refers is extant but appears to have been abandoned, not for the first time. I contributed to it between February 2015 and April 2016 when it was run by two men in Slovenia. Rather flatteringly I was head hunted and given the title Chief Editor. Sadly, they were unable to make it pay and eventually sold the domain to someone who like them and the previous owner(s) were unable to make it pay. The other claims Alexia in Wonderland makes about me are too stupid to comment on.

I kept Ted informed of developments in her case, and he wasn’t surprised because as a solicitor who dealt with people who walked into his office off the street, he had over the years met more than his fair share of crazy women. They are far more dangerous than crazy men, because the latter – who often resort to violence – are relatively easy to avoid, but the female of the species can do enormous damage without coming near you.

On the brighter side, he had also made the acquaintance of many zany women, and his work with the anti-censorship movement led to him receiving the 2002 award for Campaigner For Erotic Freedom by the Sexual Freedom Awards. Ted is pictured below with David Webb and Tuppy Owens.

It’s difficult to believe he has now been gone a full year, but his memory, and even more importantly his work, will live on.