E are sad to inform you that John Charteris is dead.’ The sense of loss is tempered by approval of the wording. John, who was an Elder of the Kirk and less emotional about death than most—and usually said at funerals, ‘Well, another one gathered’—would have hated the genteelism ‘passed away’. I wonder how news will spread in future without the hunt email, the critical link in our community, if the Axis of Spite succeeds in closing us
