THAT colourful politician and broadcaster Gyles Brandreth tells the story of how he took the liberty of inviting Sir John Gielgud to a private lunch on the great man's 90th birthday. He though there might be more pressing engagements but, much to his delight, Sir John accepted and duly turned up on the day.

Gyles was keen to express his gratitude for the honour but Gielgud waved aside the flattery. ''Oh, it's all right, dear boy,'' he said. ''You see, all my real friends are dead!''

Knowing something of Sir John, I could not imagine that he intended to insult his host in any way. And I can also understand what he meant.

Even though he is of my father's generation, I am already experiencing the alarming rate of loss among friends. In the past three weeks

I have had the task of writing no fewer than five obituaries for

The Herald.

The first of these concerned that Scottish broadcasting legend Archie P Lee, whose last illness prevented us from keeping a luncheon appointment at which he said he intended to pass on to me the basis of some world-class ''scoop'' from bygone days which the enterprising Archie had keep secret until it could safely be told. I was evidently to be the privileged inheritor of this

story. I can only vaguely guess what it was about.

Imagine my astonishment, therefore, when a letter arrived a few days after The Herald had published my tribute to the late Archie P Lee - and I felt sure I recognised the writing. It was indeed a letter from Archie himself, written just before he died and saying it would now be all right to visit him, even though he felt far from well. There was still that story to tell . . .

The last of those five people to whom I paid tribute was Johnny Reid, who spent his working life as a farm servant in my native land of Buchan but suddenly emerged in his sixties as a writer of exquisite prose. It was the classic case of a light that was hidden under a bushel. With modesty finally pushed aside, he enjoyed a belated career under

the pen-name of David Toulmin, expressing uniquely the drudgery and delights of farm life in Scotland between the wars.

I have many memories of Johnny Reid/David Toulmin, but one in particular. In the 1980s, I was driving westward from Bangkok when I came upon the poignancy of the Bridge on the River Kwai, scene of those Japanese horrors so chillingly recalled in the film of that name, starring Alec Guinness.

It was here that men of the Gordon Highlanders, the Argylls and many other regiments, prisoners of the Japs, dropped dead from disease, starvation, sheer exhaustion or worse, as they sweated to build a railway line from Siam to Burma so that Japan might reach India. It was one of the blackest chapters in all history - man's inhumanity to man gone berserk.

Apart from the chugging of an old train still plying that rail-line, all that was left now was the silence of the cemeteries.

So I wandered among the 6500 graves of Kanchanaburi and sought out those from my native Aberdeenshire, the Gordon Highlanders, on the off-chance that I might recognise a name.

Details on the little crosses were disappointingly scant but, finally, I came across one which said more: Pte R W Willox of the Gordon Highlanders: Died 7th June 1943, aged 25: Remembered by his father, mother and family at Sandford Lodge, Peterhead.

Sandford Lodge was a farm just 10 miles from where I grew up. Pte Willox would probably have been a farm servant around Peterhead in the 1930s and would now have been 70. Would there be anyone left to remember him?

I stood there, unable to drag myself away from that graveside. He was a ''Buchan loon'' like myself, an innocent victim of war who would forever lie in this corner of Thailand, on the other side of the world.

I took pictures of his grave, mouthed a few words of farewell in our native tongue, and left him to his everlasting peace.

Back home, I wondered where I might begin my inquiries. Then suddenly I remembered that Johnny Reid was a farm servant near Peterhead in the 1930s. It was worth a try. His wife Margaret answered the phone and handed me over to her husband. I explained the story and there was a pause at the other end. ''That'll be Rob Willox ye're speakin' aboot,'' said Johnny. ''Ay man, I kent him fine. In fact, he was my wife's brother!''

I then spoke to Margaret again and heard of her beloved brother, one of 10 children, who had gone off to war that September day and was home on leave at harvest-time of 1940 before being posted to Singapore with the Second Gordons.

Singapore fell to the Japs and prisoners were moved north to that Railroad of Death on the River Kwai. I was glad I had taken those snapshots of the grave, for now they would find their rightful home.