I do not know how many readers of this blog will actually have known, or known of, my great friend the environmentalist David Fleming, who died very suddenly in November 2010. We mourned him greatly and mourned even more the fact that Lean Logic, the massive work which had consumed his latter years, might never reach a wider audience than the 500 hundred of us who bought the privately printed edition published after his death.
But no! Thanks to the sterling efforts of his erstwhile assistant, Shaun Chamberlain and his niece Lucy, publishers Chelsea Green will be printing not only a full version of Lean Logic, but a ‘potted’ paperback version as well. This cannot fail to be a delight and, as I said in the review I wrote when the private edition was published, ‘could provide either the basis for a PhD or the perfect reading for a comfortable and well appointed loo?…’
Please do read my review – only so that you are primed and ready for the publication of the new edition which Shaun hopes might just make it to the bookshelves by the fifth anniversary of David’s death next November. What celebration that will be!!!
So good to see a picture of David who was one of my two best friends for the last 20 years of his life (if you can bear my maths). My two favourite memories are of his splendidly inexperienced treatment of a woman on a date once, details of which he happily shared with me while seeming to have no idea of how innocent he was, – and of another time when I was ill and he would bring organic meals across Hampstead to me every day without seeming to realize how generous he was being. What a wonderful man. A ‘Horatio’ if ever there was one (I mean Hamlet’s friend, of course). I now live in the USA but occasionally play a video I have of us talking on the Heath which is on Youtube, more details of which can be had from me at jwcactor@yahoo.com
He was a wonderful man, wasn’t he. It is rare that people really are ‘true originals’ but David certainly was. If you are interested you can now pre-order he new version ons Lean Logic from Chelsea Green here. I will, of course, blog further when it hits the light of day.