The death of a reporter is rarely treated as a major event, and perhaps rightly so.
While some of us believe reporting to be an important and worthwhile function of democratic society, whatever lapses from taste, decency and proportion occasionally occur, we still accept that reporters should, by and large, bring the news, not make it.
Yet I make no apology for using Salut! from time to time to pay homage to fellow practitioners who have died.
At or about the time that an intellectually challenged individual, someone who happens to support Newcastle United football team, was posting mindless abuse at my football site (because it is devoted to Newcastle's great rivals, Sunderland), another fan of that club was breathing his last.
Kevin McElderry (centre, in the second photo) was only 44. He died from cancer two years after being diagnosed with the disease while based in Hong Kong as Agence France-Presse's news editor and deputy editor-in-chief for the Asia-Pacific region.
It struck me that while Kevin entered cheerfully into the more good-natured form of the banter that passes between each side of the Wear/Tyne divide, he would also have been contemptuous of the idiot posting his odious messages at Salut! Sunderland.
But my reflections on the chalk-and-cheese nature of these two individuals did not provide the main inspiration for the decision to write a few lines of tribute. I was motivated more by my failure to find much mention of his death online (despite my acknowledgement that reporters should generally be relatively anonymous craftsmen and women).
Kevin's widow, Ailsa, had told me she believed AFP was planning a blog because there had been so many messages of sympathy. If anyone can find it, I'd be grateful for the link which has so far eluded me. (UPDATE: the blog can now be found by clicking here).
AFP did put out a short news item which I found at the Expatica site. It read in part:
McElderry, one of the agency's finest writers and editors, was the Hong Kong-based news editor and deputy editor-in-chief for the Asia-Pacific region for three years from 2006.
McElderry previously worked in AFP's London and Berlin bureaus and was the deputy head of the English desk in Paris from 2004 to 2006.
He was known in the agency for his great writing style, kindness and sense of humour. He also had the rare ability to keep reporters happy while entirely recasting their copy.
After continuing to work during his treatment, he even insisted on working a shift or more a week in the office, or at home, on his return to Paris last year, by which time it was clear his illness was beyond cure or even control. He died at home in Saint-Germain-en-Laye last week.
Kevin was born in Nigeria but brought up in Enniskillen, and no one would have taken him for anything other than an Ulsterman. We talked quite regularly when he was a member of the reporting team at North News and Pictures, a news agency based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Our paths then crossed again in Paris.
A mutual friend, Martin Emmerson, ex-North News, now at BBC Radio Newcastle (right, in the photo), had put us in touch again and we met for drinks after work one evening, on the right bank of the Seine near the City Hall, and then, with our wives, for a meal near the Opera that Ailsa remembers as Thai and I thought had been Vietnamese.
Kevin and Ailsa also came at least once to the magnificent flat The Daily Telegraph, in those grander days, had on the rue de Rivoli, with its sensational view stretching from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower.
It was from Martin, again, that I heard a few months ago how ill Kevin was. We had a couple of e-mail exchanges which, as I have described in a message at Expatica, demonstrated such stoicism and humour that I found them seriously uplifting.
In the first, in April, Kevin spoke of "looking forward to the race for northeast supremacy next season", Newcastle of course having been promoted back to the Premier league, and told me a little, without hint of self-pity, about his condition.
"Was diagnosed middle of summer 2008 while in Hong Kong, a year of ops and treatment there didn't clear it up so returned to Paris last summer to see what the French can do. Unfortunately it's invaded the liver and aortic lymph nodes as well as the stomach so that it's neither operable nor curable, plus I apparently have an annoying gene anomoly which has scuppered the conventional treatments. Anyway, it's gone too far too quickly, so the oncologists are muttering about just trying to squeeze an extra few months out. We'll see. The oddity is that I feel fine, no pain that can't be managed etc. Had a little scare a month ago after a gastro which nearly did for me, otherwise am up and about around house, outside too sometimes, watching kids grow up etc."
Only five weeks before his death, Kevin gave me his assessment of the way the World Cup had been going and expressed his paternal dismay that his 10-year-old son, Tristan, had developed such an affection for Liverpool FC that he had written a three-page application for the manager's position, then vacant.
The medical news was not great, but nor was it so grim as to give the impression that the disease was about to enter its savage final phase. Kevin was, as usual, approaching each day with his glass half full.
My thoughts are with Ailsa, and with Tristan and his sister Sophie. But I cannot improve on Martin Emmerson's words about Kevin: "One of the nicest lads I've ever known."
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