Dave Reeder: A tribute

The bemused look on Dave Reeder's face as he poses alongside a permanently preening Paris Hilton epitomises the man. Entirely unimpressed by celebrity for its own sake, he was far happier when interviewing chefs, discussing food and wine, and laughing uproariously with friends.

It came as a shock to wake up this morning to the news that Dave had died. And it was not as if he died in the last day or so - in this online age, we tend to learn about the passing of friends and family quickly. But, in a final tragic irony for a man who was a copious communicator and prolific writer, it turns out that he died last November and the news only filtered through to many of us in the past 24 hours.

In the last couple of years of Dave's life, he was struggling with health issues, with having to put aside plans to retire to France and instead live in his late parents' house in Devon, and with trying to rationalise his possessions which had filled every room, but he was still Dave. Facebook is deviously good at making people feel like they are not alone - for Dave, it was a place for him to update everyone on the minutiae of his life, as well as his thoughts on the state of the world and his strong opinions on food, as he lived alone in a cold house, where mountains of unsorted boxes were preventing him from bleeding the radiators.

But in between massive overshares about his assorted medical conditions (some of us are still recovering from his "arse tags" revelation...), the essential Dave was still there online, reporting from the house in Chagford or the village pub, defending his pescatarianism, expressing his sorrow at the terror attacks in Paris, despairing at the hell of ready-meals and people who can't cook, flying the flag for atheism, reporting on cheese and wine combinations, getting involved in spirited online debates.

And that was Dave at his best - the bemused raconteur with plenty to say. This morning, I thought back to meeting him for the first time. We were both working in Dubai and, over much wine, we debated the ethics of eating meat, agreeing to always disagree when I said that I had no moral issue with eating animals. 

Then I remembered when I last saw Dave in person - we met at a pub in London a few years back and I turned up with my dress tucked into my tights - a faux pas I only realised when I took my coat off before going to the bar - and walked across the pub with my bum on display. I can still hear him roaring with laughter. I chose the restaurant for dinner poorly - Maggie Jones is one of my favourite places in all of London but it slipped my mind that it is a terrible restaurant for anyone who doesn't eat meat. He pulled a face similar to the one in the photo with Paris Hilton as he perused the menu for a dish that would not offend his sensibilities, finally ordering the standard option offered by a chef who can't be arsed with vegetarians, a beetroot and goat's cheese tart. I, meanwhile, had the venison and he rolled his eyes and laughed loudly again. It is a restaurant where they charge for fine French wine by the inch from jeroboams - this amused him and all was well with the world again.

And since then, we communicated via Facebook. Quite a few of us became increasingly worried about him as he was slowly swallowed whole by boxes that needed to be unpacked, and by a collection of vintage horror books and magazines that he wanted to catalogue for sale to shore up his retirement fund. Tough love Facebook interventions were held, urging him to make a start, little by little, on the boxes, to accept the local offers of help, sharing links to vintage book dealers in the county who might be able to value his collection and maybe take the tomes off his hands. Dave became a frustrating, frustrated version of himself as he was increasingly overwhelmed by the house, his health issues and his disappointment about not being able to easily retire to his beloved France.

He last posted on Facebook on November 23 and it was a microcosm of his life towards the end - it appears that he had started cooking the formerly derided ready-meals instead of making dishes from scratch and sharing his tips on his page, but he was still dripping with his trademark sardonic tone: "Tesco is really losing the plot. A search for Thai ready-meals throws up ''Tesco Mushroom Stroganoff With Wild Rice' as its top suggestion. Such a well-known Thai dish..."

His birthday was on February 7. We all posted the obligatory Facebook birthday greetings, inquired about his wellbeing and wondered why he had been so uncharacteristically quiet. But it was a birthday he never quite got around to, all of us blissfully unaware that he had not been with us for a while. The sense that you are not alone with Facebook is merely illusory. A friend and I had talked about driving a van down to Chagford, turning up on his doorstep and blitzing the boxes. Maybe we should have set aside a weekend to do just that. Maybe we all could have done more. We will never quite know. 

The loose ends death almost always leave behind remain unbearably frayed, a ragged edge with which we must make peace.

What we do know is that a funny, smart, sometimes infuriating presence has gone from our lives. But he leaves behind a great legacy as a journalist and editor, as a mentor to many a young hack, as a staunch defender of print journalism. He would send me copies of the last magazine he edited before he retired, asking for my opinion on the contents and covers - for all his eagerness to be the first to share his views on everything from Bram Stoker to Brexit, Dave still sought out the honest opinions of people he respected. It was a privilege to be respected by Dave.

Despite living the latter years of his life largely online, Dave was always an entertaining presence in the real world. We should remember him with joy, with wine, and with opinionated but friendly debates, ideally over the dinner table with fine cheese to finish.

From abusive sex tourism by the privileged to Love Island

I have been reading a terrible book. It's called Sultry Climates by Ian Littlewood. The book's subtitle is "Travel and sex since the Grand Tour". Within its pages, you will find an uncritical, morally lazy look at sex tourism of the privileged without any voice given to the people with whom these men - and a few token women - were having sex.

A direct line can be drawn between the apologia for pederasty by men such as Byron, as recounted in this book, and the horrendous advocacy of sex between grown men and 13-year-old boys by deeply insecure, attention-seeking troll-for-hire, Milo Yiannopolous, who is rapidly becoming a fringe figure as he desperately tries to stay relevant. 

For many, Milo's comments were a bigotry too far - after being totally fine with his racism, sexism and Poundland economics - just as the fan bases of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris rightly withered away after revelations of their sexual abuse of minors came to light. It is a sign of an improved society that child rape - for that is what paedophilia is - is looked upon by most people as being abhorrent. 

In Sultry Climates, Littlewood quotes the writings of white, wealthy British men (and the rather dreadful Paul Gaugin) who could afford to travel to Europe as well as countries such as Algeria, Morocco and Tahiti, in centuries gone by. Some of these men are gay and the book does nothing to dispel the myth that all gay men are paedophiles. Excerpts, mostly from diaries and letters, about seeking out inevitably "beautiful boys" and men procuring these kids for each other, are published without any real critique, except to say that travelling away from conservative Britain was a blessed release for gay men in a less enlightened time.  

There is no attempt by Littlewood to find out who these boys were, whether they were prostituted at the behest of poor families, what physical and emotional damage was left behind when these selfish, self-indulgent men returned home. Obviously, it is appalling that until relatively recently, it was very difficult and indeed illegal to be openly gay on Britain - but that does not excuse child rape. 

And it's not just gay men getting their rocks off with children who are romanticised by Littlewood. There is an account of a man having sex with a girl of 12, again written about with any real thought to what the experience would have been like from the point of view of the victim. It's just something men do because they can, because while abroad, they are free of the apparently terrible constraints that prevent them from raping girls. That particularly disturbing passage was all about how the man in question could not believe his good fortune.

And when the book shares accounts from further afield in South Pacific, you can almost hear Littlewood's hand furiously grinding away in his underpants as he again lets the privileged men describe their encounters with local women. These women were, as far as they were concerned, all willing participants, offering themselves to ship-weary travellers. Like the "beautiful boys" who were picked up in Europe and North Africa, all the women of the South Pacific are described as physically magnificent to the point of fetishising them. He describes the men who were drawn to the South Pacific as "rebel spirits" when "rapists" is more accurate. But there is zero research conducted into the lives of these women by Littlewood or the real consequences of men landing on their shores and colonising their bodies as well as their land.

Indeed, women take a secondary role across the entire book, aside from a few paragraphs here and there. The women are, like the men in this book, wealthy enough to afford to travel in pre-Easyjet times to places where they can enjoy sexual freedom away from Victorian expectations of marriage and childbirth. The stories of their sexual encounters, in which they miraculously seem able to steer clear of abusing kids, are dropped in with minimal research. 

Embarrassingly, the book concludes with references to Club Med as a latter day equivalent to the sexually free tours of abusive posh gits in days of yore. I had forgotten Club Med was still a thing and, having taken a peek at their website, I am amazed that it still is a thing - their prices are ridiculous and the search engine is terrible.

Obviously, the "what happens on tour stays on tour" mentality still exists for many people (most of us know of at least one married or partnered-up person who uses business trips as an excuse to shag around) and there are still plenty of British men who sexually exploit women while on holiday - and this is no longer limited to wealthy men in this era of more affordable international travel. It would be naive to think otherwise - but these exploits are not necessarily romanticised in the way Littlewood does in his pitiful tome. 

And that brings us to Love Island, which has people across the nation glued to ITV to see which of the nubile young contestants will be "coupled up", who will get "mugged off" and whether it is possible to form a serious relationship while doing "cheeky challenges" for the cameras.

It is all too easy to sneer at Love Island, to consider oneself to be socially, morally and intellectually above the contestants. But it is more honest and wholesome than any of the abusive behaviour that happened when wealthy, privileged men escaped Britain to chase sex elsewhere with scant regard for consequences or consent. Sure, Hayley thought Brexit might mean that all the trees will be cut down, but she epitomises the not-uncommon phenomenon of the physically glorious young woman who has only had one lover. For all the moral panicking going on out there about teenage sexual behaviour, research from the Next Steps Project found that one in eight people aged 26 are still virgins, a much higher proportion than around one in 20, as studies of earlier generations found. 

So far, only two, maybe three, couples have had sex in the current series of Love Island, with the first couple "doing bits" on episode 16. Only a seriously tedious prude would consider that rate of shaggery as some sort of orgy. The fact they refer to sex as "doing bits" tells you everything you need to know, bless 'em.

And unlike the wealthy creeps of centuries past, the sex that's happening on Love Island is consensual. Nobody is underage, nobody is being exploited, nobody is bothered about social class, and even if "doing bits" is a euphemism that makes me think of grinding things with a mortar and pestle rather than one's genitals, the young men and women are able to talk about what they're getting up to without rushing to either confession or their mothers. Only the nation's dreariest wet blankets are getting upset. 

Give me a society where sex is consensual and discussed without embarrassment over one where sexual freedom is only for the privileged few at the expense of the vulnerable in faraway lands. Whether they realise it or not, the Love Islanders are flipping a massive bird at past hypocrisies and for that. I salute them.

Photo by Oliver Sjöström from Pexels