So, as the satirical magazine Private Eye (recommended as an effective Daily Mail antidote) would have it, farewell then Keith Waterhouse.

I used to be a nurse in another life. I worked on permanent night duty (12 hour shifts, seven in a row) for two years once in the very early 1980's. It was a personally and relationship damaging cul-de-sac as it turns out, but that has no relevance to my tale right now. At the time I was the male equivalent of a "Sister" and I was in charge of four wards, despite my youth. The staff were generally excellent and so, apart from regular (but not so regular as to be predictable!) rounds, unless there were new admissions or patients close to death - yes, dear reader, I'm afraid that people do die despite the best ministrations of hospital staff - I would sit in the various ward offices reviewing notes,treatment plans, drug schedules and the like. By 2 a.m. things had often settled on the wards - those in pain were comfortable, those who couldn't sleep were helped so to do (that's how it was) and those about to go gentle in to that good night had not yet entered their final hour.

It was then that I would read for a while. In Plymouth, where this tale takes place, there was a second hand bookshop that I loved and from there, as was my habit, I randomly picked, a yellowing, musty copy of Keith Waterhouse's first book, "There Is A Happy Land". This was one of those touchstone books for me that we all have in our lives. Ones that we will always remember, sometimes distortedly, sometimes nostalgically as "one of the best books I've ever read". What we actually mean of course is that the book connected directly with us at that point in our lives. Not necessarily because of it's subject matter, but because of some weird alchemy that turned base writing in to gold because we were in a place that made us receptive to it.

"There Is A Happy Land" describes life, from a child's eye view, on a council estate in Leeds in the post war years. The life there is colourful, funny and shocking in it's casual cruelty, but it is equally as warm and life affirming as it is raw and real.

It was the first of the author's books that I ever read and, despite reading several more over the years (although not his most famous - "Billy Liar"), none of the others, though they charmed and amused me, recaptured the un-put-down-ability of that second hand, dog eared tome.

No matter - if he were only to have written one book and that one was "There Is A Happy Land" then that would be enough for me. I look at it on my bookshelf even as I write.

Thank you Keith. You touched my heart and fired my imagination. Better still, you retain that power even from beyond the pale, every time I pull your book down and read the words you wrote, on a clanky typewriter in a land less priviledged than mine, where happiness was still in the rainbow pattern on a roadside puddle.