Fidelma Cook: The Herald's tribute to our beloved columnist

She told her readers what was going on in her life and listened to what was going on in theirs, by email or Twitter (something she took to at first with suspicion and then with passion).

The original catalyst for the column, in 2006, was Fidelma’s decision to sell her flat in Glasgow and move to France. Lots of people speculate about doing it, and Fidelma had been in love with the idea of France since she was a little girl.

But suddenly, after taking redundancy from her job at the Mail on Sunday, she decided that yes, she would go for it after all. She had her doubts of course, but the final decision was made with her chum Peter Samson over a curry and a few glasses of red wine (a few glasses of red wine would become a recurring theme of her columns). “Right,” she said, “I’m going to do it.”

It was Peter who then suggested The Herald might like a regular column on the subject and from the start it was a success with readers, partly because Fidelma was willing to admit that every silver living comes with a cloud.

In her first column, she told readers she thought she was doing the right thing in moving to France except when she thought she was doing the wrong thing.

The column started with Fidelma sitting in her flat, emptied of furniture. “There is nothing sadder than an empty, stripped flat at midnight,” she wrote, “But I also feel that stomach-churning anticipatory excitement that, as a woman of a certain age, I haven’t felt in years.”

And so off she went. She wasn’t entirely alone: her companion for the new life was her beloved Afghan hound, Portia, who would become a recurring co-star in her columns. Her son Pierce also regularly cropped up, often exasperated, often shaking his head, and often asking his mother why she had decided to live in the middle of a field in France.

Then, one by one, a colourful cast of French men and women, and British expats, joined in; the French often looked at this small, elegant writer with suspicion and the small, elegant writer often looked at her fellow Brits in France with exasperation. But, slowly, the new life began.

Fidelma’s new home – after many weeks of searching – was Las Molieres, which she sometimes said was the house not of her dreams but of her price bracket.

To fund her new life, she had her redundancy payment, the proceeds from the sale of her flat and cash from a couple of pensions. What she didn’t have was the practical skills to deal with some of the problems that a house in the French countryside would bring.

She also couldn’t and wouldn’t cook. “I’ve never made an omelette in my life,” she said, “and I loathe fines herbes.”

As she revealed in her columns, the first six months in France were tricky and there were times, she admitted, when she would have happily crawled back to Glasgow if she could have.

“At this precise moment,” she wrote in 2008, “you can have what I’ve got for a bag of fish, chips and mushy peas – heavy on the vinegar, light on the salt. Stuff the baguettes, the foie gras, the bloody fetes, the lousy television and the cheap red wine.

“I want life – real life with mayhem and madness; wide dirty pavements; nasty, vicious office gossip; fights and fallouts. I want Chinese food, Indian food, Italian food, anything but French food, followed by a stumble around the west end of Glasgow.

“Now that I’m living the fantasy, I realise I have neither the temperament nor the stomach for it. Actually, I haven’t the liver for it either.”

However, slowly, intermittently and then passionately, Fidelma began to appreciate the wonderful upsides of her new life in France.

She began to develop a relationship with her farmer neighbours, who would leave fruit and vegetables piled at her door, invite her to their homes and come rushing at any emergency (something she would have need of quite a few times).

Sun-loving Fidelma also appreciated the short winters, the spring and summer temperatures averaging 30 degrees, regular fetes, the soirees, the markets, the food, and, mais ben sur, the wine.

Her friends, family and colleagues admired what she’d done, but worried about her, too.

Peter Samson became her friend in the 1980s when he was a young reporter and Fidelma was working on the newsdesk and he could see straight away what a great journalist she was.

“She was very fair,” he says, “and knew what she wanted.”

He was also impressed by the breadth of her knowledge and interests.

“She never got rid of any of the books she’d bought over the years and had a huge library in France.”

She had a voracious appetite for words, he says, and found a great new outlet for it in her column. “Her column was an art and she was an artist.”

Peter also had no worries about her decision to move to France. “I had no fears that she would be unable to do it,” he says.

“She wasn’t a good money manger and the crises she referred to in her column were 100 per cent true.

“But moving to France was a way of buying a house mortgage-free and living relatively cheaply and she loved the sunshine.”

France was also a place where she could indulge in her long love of fine wine and fine champagne.

Peter remembers being at her house for lunch on one occasion when she poured some champagne. “I said ‘Oh, Sainsbury’s Black Label’ and she said ‘Yes, it’s perfect for an everyday Champagne!’”

Fellow colleague Melanie Reid, now a columnist on The Times, also remembers her love of the bubbly. “I remember when we moved into a house in the country near her,” says Melanie.

“She and George, her partner, arrived on a sunny afternoon with a bottle of top quality champagne. Because I was thrifty, and not much of a drinker, I ssumed it was to keep for a special occasion, put it away and offered them a cup of tea.

“She was too polite to say anything — it wasn’t until I knew her better that I understood the appalled expression on her face. Every day was an opportunity for a special occasion for Fidelma.”

Another colleague Dorothy-Grace Elder, who worked with Fidelma in newspapers and on television, was also impressed by her strengths.

“She was the ultimate professional,” she says, “to the point of her last column appearing on the day she died. Fidelma always swished with style – what a distinctive exit.”

Dorothy-Grace Elder also remembers Fidelma’s willingness to stand up to her bosses when required.

“A point which should never be forgotten is Fidelma’s courage in standing against London BBC pushing aside BBC Scotland on a big news story, even when the original exclusive was from Scotland. Fidelma and her crew were on Orkney on another story when they came upon a horrific cull of seals with baby seals being bludgeoned to death. Fidelma’s story was massive and went global – then she was told to stand down, London was sending a team. But Fidelma was bigger in guts. She refused to abandon her story and later resigned on principle.”

Fidelma’s son Pierce said the confrontation was typical of his mother, who was willing to stand up to bosses when required; he was also a great admirer of her abilities as a writer.

His mother was only unable to file her Herald column a handful of times in 15 years – due to illness – and Pierce once stood in to keep her readers updated.

“My mother,” he wrote, “has a vivid imagination as well as a deep reserve to process multiple pieces of information simultaneously.

READ MORE: Fidelma's voice will live on

“She sieves through the material and discards the irrelevant, flags the untrustworthy, makes sure to understand the motives and context of the original sources.

“Combine this with her wit, vast experience and personal opinion and when my mother has her full capacity and is not struggling with COPD, cancer or pneumonia, she is a phenomenally exciting person to spend time with – a firecracker.”

As for Fidelma herself, the column became an important place for her to work out her own thoughts about France and her new life.

“If The Herald thought they were commissioning a glorious happy romp through the sunflower fields,” she wrote, “they have allowed me to trudge instead down very different, often muddy, miserable by-ways.

“I was determined from the start to be as honest as was possible without alienating too many people. However, I have always reserved the right to write about how I see life, which is subjective, naturally, as we all see “truth” very differently.”

In later years, Fidelma also wrote honestly, painfully, and movingly about her health. She had always loved les cigarettes as much as she loved le vino, but after being diagnosed with emphysema, her doctors told her she had to stop. And so she did, in 2015, becoming rather addicted to e-cigarettes in the process.

She also broke her leg and spent several weeks in hospital – all of which she wrote about with engaging frankness.

“I smoked. I haven’t eaten properly for years. I love wine. What do I expect? To go carousing, all bones intact, into that last goodnight? But that’s it, in a nutshell. I’m in the foothills of old age and have depleted the reserves one needs to climb up and up and up. Bugger.”

Living alone in France for many years also changed Fidelma: she’d become odd, she said, but odd in a good way ... “like eating “Sunday” lunch early on a Monday morning and washing it down with, ooh, maybe just one more glass. Or learning to tap dance from YouTube; shouting at the dog to “grow up” or to “get your own bloody life” and engaging cold callers in a random discussion while betting with oneself how quickly they’ll hang up. It’s also having a Mars bar or a bag of Maltesers for dinner without some bugger asking “what we’re having”.”

Another great comfort to Fidelma was the relationship she built up with her readers. Thanks to the immediacy and ease of the internet, she said, she built an extraordinary, even intimate, relationship with many people she would never meet. “There are Regs and Reginas who write and tell me of all that befalls them and I vicariously share in their hopes, their joys and, often, their miseries. I consider it a privilege that my readers feel, for all my sometimes still childish outbursts of rage here, that they can tell me anything and I will understand.”

By early 2020, like the rest of us, Fidelma was living in the strange world of lockdown. “I have self-isolated, which actually is not too major a sacrifice as I’ve been more or less self-isolated for the past few years.” Then in May 2020, she fell and shattered her femur, knee and shoulders and was unable, for the first time ever, to write her column.

Fellow columnist Hugh MacDonald stood in for her and sang her praises. Fidelma was read by the First Minister, said Hugh, but she wasn’t writing for her, she was writing for herself.

“She takes her life with its routine humiliations, its senseless pain and its occasional, and overwhelming joy and presents it to us with an eloquence that is only superseded by her bravery. She tells us every Saturday how she is feeling as a dog sulks, bones complain and her house gently falls down around her.

“There is anger, contentment, bitterness, resignation, humour, sadness, happiness and even consolation in all of this. The dog finally comes in. The pain usually subsides. And the house? Well, who cares? It’s a house, it has a fridge, it hosts a glass and there is a tincture of something pleasantly numbing in its deepest interior.”

For Fidelma, it got even tougher though. In August 2020, she was diagnosed with fast acting metastatic lung cancer and never were her columns more intimate and moving and never did her readers feel closer to her. After realising that she had been close to death, she passed on some lessons for life, even though, she said with her usual self-deprecation, it was all a bit late.

“I wish I’d told my son more often how much I loved him and how proud he made me instead of expecting him to know it. I wish I realised he loved me too in the same way and I hope he knows too the joy I get from seeing his love in his two small daughters.

“I wish I’d accepted the love offered from the odd, kind decent man instead of seeing it as a weakness – discovering too late it’s a strength beyond price when wrapped in strong arms as night falls.

“I wish, too, I’d admitted my loneliness and the stubbornness that drove me here and kept me here. But as many things in life all is understood just that little too late and anyway it was fun at the time, wasn’t it?”

As her treatment progressed and Fidelma went home and then back into hospital, she continued to write about her illness, always honestly, and often with exasperation, especially when she was diagnosed with Covid.

“I’m not the warrior you think I am. Without my hope I’m a frightened woman checking every new twinge and odd pain, feeling my heart beat faster with the fear. None of us get off Scot-free in this life – it’s just a matter of timing and degree, and how we deal with it.”

This was one of Fidelma’s great strengths: her willingness to be honest. She pursued an idea, an instinct, and it took her to France and perhaps, she admitted, it was just pride that kept her there. But that was just how things are: dreams come with realities.

“France is a lure,” she wrote, “France is a draw; France is a hot summer market sitting outside a cafe with a cold white wine; France is a cobbled square and a waft of garlic; France is a tune played over and over again; France is a scarf wrapped twice around a throat; France is an oyster popped in a mouth; France is a coat collar turned up against the world; France is a farmer in a white van; France is just another country to live in.”