Not long before he died, at the age of 46, my friend Nick Walker was interviewed by the film-maker Tim Wainwright, for a project called Soul. Talking to camera, Nick says: “As a secular Scot, it’s important to me to know that we live in a Newtonian world, of fragile bodies and short corners. As to whether we have souls, it’s a question that tends to be answered yes or no.” He frowns for a second, then goes on: “I think it’s more interesting and useful to approach the issue from the other direction. Perhaps we are soul, and we have a body for the time that we’re alive. We are soul, but we have a body.”
It was typical Nick. The legally trained son of an Edinburgh lawyer, David, and an academic, Gesa, he was constitutionally averse to easy answers. Precision was a moral imperative, words things to be used carefully. In Wainwright’s film, Nick is measured, magisterial. Souls are clearly not in his repertoire, but he takes the idea of them seriously. Nick is also astonishingly handsome, with the hawkish Scots beauty of a Raeburn portrait. What is less clear from the film is that he is in a wheelchair, paralysed by multiple sclerosis.
That would please him. Crossing the road in Paris in the early 90s, Nick stopped in mid-traffic, saying simply: “My legs aren’t working.” It was the start of a process that took a quarter of a century to end. People who die slowly are commonly described as saintly. Nick was not one of these, or not always. If his normal mood was of anarchic good humour, he sometimes raged against his disability, was downcast by it.
He had been sexy, a dancer, a clubber. More, he had been a journalist, going from Cambridge University to the Independent newspaper’s graduate trainee scheme. When he fell ill, Nick was on probation at Time Out magazine. He didn’t get the job. His real exasperation, though, was at the illogic of it all. He was ill, not an illness. When an MS charity, well meaning, offered to hire him, he winced. “I want to be a journalist who happens to have MS,” he said, “not a man with MS who happens to be a journalist.”
And so he wrote on, for as long as he could: on elderly clubbers for the Evening Standard; on being sacked by McDonald’s for the Independent; memorably, on men’s rears for the Erotic Review. (“Homo sapiens is the only animal that has a bottom as such.”) He travelled, made radio programmes, drew scabrous cartoons, did an Open University degree; loved and was loved.
Nick is survived by his mother, and his brother, John, and sister, Kirsty.
