Adam Hopkins September 1939 - November 2024

Sometimes, panic stops my breath.
You’ve always been anxious, my wife says.
To comfort me?
Or is there a note of impatience?
Anxious? Not me.
Because now the sky is really falling.

Adam Hopkins entered my life when I was 11 years old, forever altering the course of our family dynamic.

He swept my mother off her feet, as a lecturer on a Journalism Course at the London College of Printing. At first, she would come back from the course to revise shorthand - Teeline. She had a bright yellow digital stopwatch and a smart Marantz portable tape recorder.

Meeting Adam for the first time in his Hackney flat left me with mixed impressions. He was introduced to me as Mum's friend. He seemed awkward, unsure how to connect with a child, and the car magazine he gave me felt like a token gesture, more for my mother’s sake than mine. I couldn’t miss the way he touched her hip in the kitchen, a subtle, familiar gesture that left me feeling uneasy, even if I didn’t fully understand why.

Adam was a writer. A journalist, poet and travel writer. All before he met my mother. Together they forged a literary life. They bought a house in Camberwell, London and used it as a base, travelling, writing and presenting a show on cable called The Arts Channel from a TV studio in Wales.

I was impressed and willed them to have success for the good of all our futures.

As time went on, they ended up dividing their time in equal parts between the UK and Extremadura where they held walking tours. We spent many family holidays with them together surrounded by natural bathing pools fed by mountain springs, meeting the locals that they had befriended and enjoying orange juice straight from their own orchard.

In his final years, as dementia unravelled his sharp mind, Mum’s devotion became his anchor. Looking back, I often wondered how best to encapsulate a life as full and layered as Adam’s.

It’s impossible to capture an entire life in a few words, so we must choose carefully - selecting the moments and truths that reflect the very core of who Adam was.

Words are all we have—sometimes precise, often clumsy, always striving to conjure what we feel.

Looking at Adam’s final publication 'Remember Dementia', isn’t it particularly fitting that it is words and memories that we have now to reflect on Adam’s life?

With words, Adam had precision. In other ways, he could seem distant—aloof and buried in his work. Yet, like the shuffling, myopic Columbo, he noticed more than we might have assumed.

During one Christmas we played Trivial Pursuit. He’d sleep between rounds—not just dozing, but snoring audibly. Yet every time, he’d wake with a start, roll the dice, answer perfectly, and nod off again. We dubbed him 'The Grand Old Duke of Bunny,' a mix of startled rabbit and Monty Python general—a title he bore with good humour, despite being perpetually baffled by it. And yes, he always won.

He left an impression on all those that he encountered and due to his immediate interest in those he met people felt listened to and therefore valid.

In the early mornings, Adam would whistle as he tried—unsuccessfully—to be quiet, clinking mugs and dropping cutlery before whispering, ‘Shhh, your mother’s still sleeping.

He would ask questions, sometimes galvanising erroneous, or daft observations or points of view with a false sense of importance. Giving those he spoke with the courage to be heard regardless of how silly they might be.

He would profess to be just going off to read and minutes later we’d hear a snore from some secluded corner.

He would pick a nasty callus on his knuckle when you were trying to watch a film together to the point you’d have to shield his movements from view to concentrate.

He expressed profound wonder at the simplest things—the beauty of the morning sun, the joy of suburban life bubbling with its bland order and correctness—in a way that made you wonder if he was entirely serious. But he was.

He would ask daft questions about word processors, so afraid of the technology that he seemed to wonder how to turn the thing on when, in truth, he was perfectly capable as a grown man of this age should be.

He seemed proud of his impractical nature.

He was a good support when Dad died.

He was deeply in love with Mum, whose warmth and patience softened his sharper edges, revealing the qualities she saw in him  -  qualities that we came to appreciate and love as well.

Adam’s passions were his compass, propelling him forward in life and in love. They were what others found most magnetic about him. Whether you agreed with him, opposed him, got irritated or embarrassed by him, you couldn’t argue he was not passionate.

He breathed full, deep breaths of life and love into the world - and his fascination was infectious to those in his company, be that in person or through his work, who listened and enjoyed his unique point of view.

I am grateful for all that he was able to encapsulate in his final book of poetry - buoyed by Mum’s caring and measured hand, her keen editorial eye, and the loving presence of his family. Through that support, he was able to record this deeply personal, terrifying experience so achingly and eloquently before even those words were taken from him, so slowly and painfully.

Listen for the wind, the song, the sigh, the half-inaudible;
let all of true worth flow from its inner nature as nature suggests.
No poems to order. That is the order, and I have held it so, unbroken over the decades.  
A long life already you may say. No young bones in this depository.
Waiting for time itself to say,
‘This is the moment. These are the words.’

One thing is certain: Adam always had an audience, right to the very end—whether it was us, his family, the compassionate staff who cared for him, or the many who will continue to read his words and feel, for a moment, the vitality of his passions and the depth of his spirit.