Jim Flannery-full of deep wisdom and immense humanity

When I look back on my nine years at Reuters, one of the best things it offered was the chance to meet and slowly become friends with people like Jim Flannery. Initially, he was just a quiet, tall presence who came in for the night shift wearing a woolly orange hat. Sartorially, the look screamed "nutty eccentric", but as soon as he opened his mouth, the impression was dispelled. 

On postings as a reporter in Rome, Paris and Abidjan, I remember noticing that the initials JKF at the bottom of my stories meant that they had not only NOT been butchered, the article in question somehow read subtly better than when I'd pressed "send". He was that rare thing, an editor who always gently enhanced the copy he handled.

Jim was incredibly erudite, always funny, instinctively irreverent and often surprising. When I returned from a long stint away covering Africa -- having moved to the Financial Times and then gone freelance -- our friendship resumed. 

I ruthlessly exploited Jim's editing talents, asking him to both copyedit my first ever novel and to check that a Chinese translation of my Eritrea non-fiction book was accurate and the original hadn't been adulterated or shortened. Jim was the only person I knew who could have carried out that task, given the long years spent learning Chinese on the overnight shifts. He told me laconically that it had been enlightening, in my chapter about American GI's misbehaving in Asmara, to learn the Chinese for "blow job".

I paid him back with lunches in Primrose Hill and later, as he got less steady on his feet, dinners with both Jim and his wife Mary in the Kings Cross area.

Jim was full of deep wisdom and immense humanity. So many people pretend to be self-deprecating - Jim was the real McCoy. Such was his modesty, I doubt he ever realised how he enriched the lives of those who knew him during the 95 years he was on this earth. 

I will miss him enormously. ■