26 November 2025

I receive a message from beyond the grave. It comes dressed in Nordic socks

In memory of Ian Marchant, a brilliant writer and creative smuggler

It’s been a sad week, with the deaths of two of my favourite writers, one of them well-known to readers of this magazine. First was Rachel Cooke, who used to write TV reviews here; she was one of the few writers I have sent a fan letter to. Well, a fan message, on X. We corresponded for a while but like many correspondences, it petered out. I didn’t know she was ill until it was all over. But she was one of those writers whose byline guaranteed quality.

The other death was that of Ian Marchant, and I knew him rather better. We became friends after I kept praising his books because, well, they were praiseworthy. I realised he was a gaood ‘un from the very first page of his book about the British railway system, Parallel Lines, where he is accosted by a pair of sex workers outside St Pancras, whose architecture he was admiring. “We’ve got a place we can go,” says one, “150 for the pair of us.” Being something of an innocent in these matters, Ian thought she was talking about their rent. “That seems reasonable,” he replied.

I next came across his work three years later when he wrote The Longest Crawl, in which he went on a pub crawl from Britain’s most southerly point – St Agnes – to its most northerly – Unst. He didn’t go to every pub in between, that would have been impossible. Because I had reviewed about 150 books since I’d read Parallel Lines, his name didn’t register until I saw the “also by” page. Well, whaddaya know, I said to myself, and gave that book a glowing review too.

We then got in touch with each other, and stayed in touch. He also married someone I had studied English with at university, and that was pleasing. One abiding memory I have is when I was kicking my heels and licking my wounds in Devon, after having been ejected from the family home. There was little to do in rural North Devon and I found myself wondering if the dried sap of the Cannabis sativa plant would help the time pass more pleasantly. In those days, before county lines, and without a car, there was no way I was going to find any – so I reached out to Ian. He obliged by sending me some in the post, cunningly hidden inside a pair of socks.

“No one’s going to search through an old pair of socks,” he reasoned. It was, apparently, a tried and tested means of smuggling hash through the post, he assured me. We would refer to pot thereafter as “socks”, which made us giggle, especially if it baffled others not in on the joke.

He wrote about all sorts of things, with a leaning towards the counter-cultural, but you never knew what he was going to write about next. “It isn’t necessary for you to have read my other books in order to understand this one,” he said in a footnote in his book Something of the Night, “but it is necessary that you buy them.” This is one of the truest sentences ever written.

I knew he was dying: prostate cancer. I had wanted to visit him in Presteigne, where he lived, but first it was too far away, and then he was too ill. I hadn’t seen him for years, not since he invited me to give a talk about book reviewing to his students at Birmingham City University. I don’t do this kind of thing if I can help it, but he held my hand, figuratively speaking, throughout the ordeal, and afterwards, in the college bar, where we drank beer and smoked roll-ups (not socks) and shot the breeze.

As is so often the case, I thought he’d have more time, but he didn’t. The end came more suddenly than anticipated. I saw the announcement on his Facebook page, hot on the heels of the news about Rachel Cooke. However, fate had one little surprise in store: directly below the announcement, Facebook’s algorithm decided to display an advertisement for… socks. Nordic socks, to be precise. Now, I have never even thought of looking for socks online. I had not said the word “socks” in the presence of a smart device, or even typed the words in anger or in peace in living memory. And yet here was an advertisement acknowledging our private joke. Ian was a Christian, you know, one of the real ones who are nice and do good works. He believed that there was an afterlife of some sort, and, frankly, even though I don’t, this was a remarkable coincidence, if coincidence it was. After all, if anyone was going to have some clout with the powers Upstairs, it was Ian, and there is a part of me that likes to think he called in a favour to send me a little message.

This is, of course, demented, but we take our comforts where we can find them. Anyway, we have his books, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Oh well. Sorry if this week’s column has been rather gloomier than normal. But sometimes you have to bear witness. I don’t have much else to report anyway. I’m back in East Finchley, as it happens, doing one last stint of cat-sitting. I am about to go to the bus stop to visit my mother on what we hope is her last day in hospital. It is perishingly cold outside, I notice: -2°C when the cat woke me up this morning. Oh, for a pair of Nordic socks.

[Further reading: There’s nothing quite like lying down and thinking about death]