I had a friend called Andrea who couldn’t go within fifty yards of a fountain pen without getting ink all over her fingers. She’d wipe her fingers on her face and then I would call her the Inky Fool.Ten years ago, Andrea had an idea for a blog about the English language that we could write together. It was all her idea and we named the blog after her: Inky Fool. Back then she wrote as Mrs Malaprop and I as Dogberry. Andrea had a full-time job and I didn’t, so gradually she stopped posting and I continued, always under her watching eye.
The blog became popular and then it became famous and then I got a deal to write The Etymologicon. I wrote it, Andrea read all the proofs. She did that for all my books. When it was first published the name on the cover was
MARK FORSYTH (THE INKY FOOL).
But I was never the Inky Fool. The Inky Fool was always Andrea.
Here is a picture of us at the book launch for The Etymologicon. She was so kind and so clever, and she was my dearest friend, and she died on the seventh of July from auto-immune hepatitis. It’s a cruel disease and it isn’t studied enough. Please, if you have ever enjoyed any of my books or my blog, give a little something to the fund set up in her memory to study the disease. It doesn’t matter how little. https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/andreacolvile
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