The name Tony, for regular passers-by, may conjure up some improbable adventures of an old friend of mine whose manners and words both in public and private remained so characteristic of a classic English gentleman that they often passed more for eccentricity than a successful way of surviving our "modern" world.
Survive it he did, though, with a spirit as upright and strong as they come and a dry sense of humour shared far more frequently at his own expense than anyone else's.
Though some wide-ranging conversations in the past few years began with a quick search for either a stray hearing aid or a few marbles he only thought he had lost, Tony Brock was a man who knew what's what and told people about it in ways sometimes shared with you, either in my words or, better, his own: perfectly spiced and almost invariably funny.
No longer, I'm very sorry to tell you. Tony died last week, aged seventy-something -- I don't remember exactly and neither of us cared -- in his flat in Odessa Street.
His words done for this log, usually concise and incisive, are but drops from a well of wisdom in the ways of the women we occasionally hate to love so hard, false prophets, asinine politicians and a much-travelled world best delighted in with him at length over dinner.
 As one of the most consistently decent and modestly brave people I have known and very deeply loved throughout my life in Paris from our first meetings in the early 1980s, Tony's life as a journalist, UNESCO staff writer, fine storyteller and soldier for many a cause worth the fight was one he would rightly disapprove of any attempt to sum up in a hasty blog entry (edited March 21 to add the sun of autumnal days and a post-script on it).
Tony knew how to take his time getting it right and was among those who helped me start learning to do this myself. That he's left us was news I learned only very late last night, in a way which would have appealed to him if only because of a strong sense of the "oddness of things" we enjoyed sharing.
It came in an email from Lee, the Odessa Street woman I discovered living under the same roof as my old friend, who informed me with a real warmth and more apologies than ever needed from such a fine person of the circumstances in which she learnt earlier in the evening of his death. I'm grateful to her for telling me with courage and kindness of such a loss so promptly.
I'll indeed spend a while thinking what I'd most like further to tell you about Tony. I have a notion already, since it made him laugh so much during one of our last evenings together he said I was welcome to share it with "whomever you like".
For a hard worker and a first-rate sub-editor, however, the warmest tribute I can offer is to "knock it into shape" before unleashing it on an unstable world. This was something we did to each other, beating the hell out of the worst bits of our days, particularly of a long summer evening, before taking our better selves out on to the streets and maybe a "new restaurant, let's give it a whirl."
Many a whirl we enjoyed, because with Tony, you usually knew where you started but by the time you were ready for bed, it was with a handshake in the strangest of places. In our heads at least. Such was his discretion that nobody else noticed ... until it was too late.
Sadly, such is the nature of busy lives in a city whose subtle changes he closely observed over a good few decades, that the same proved to be true of his passing.
If this time around, Tony's wound up where he expected to be -- with a faith as Roman in its way as his vocabulary was remarkably catholic -- then a pontiff is in for an overdue and unexpectedly Anglo-Saxon greeting.
Till the next time, old chum?
___________
On posting this, I left choosing a natural illustration for a moment to do it well (as with the story for you some day). But the feeling I already knew where I wanted to look was right: thanks, Squia. With an eye like yours, even Tony's window boxes would have looked more cheerful than sometimes they did. It's tough being even a geranium when you're up against a curry joint, a greasy Turkish takeaway, and Odessa Street's constant traffic fumes.
9:16:06 PM link 
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