THIS week Craig Borland is looking for Advertiser readers’ help, following a curious social media post about a prolific contributor to the paper’s letters section in months and years gone by...
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READERS with long-ish memories, and especially those who pay close attention to the Advertiser’s letters pages, might remember the name of John Black.
John’s name first crossed my radar when he stood as a candidate in Argyll and Bute in the 2010 UK general election, representing the Scottish Jacobite Party. More recently he was a prolific contributor to our letters pages between 2017 and 2019 – to the point where other readers would regularly plead “can you please stop printing all those awful letters from John Black?” (My response was always the same – “you send us a letter, then, and we’ll print yours instead” – an invitation that all too few of them took up.)
But we haven’t heard from John since he sent us his thoughts on Helensburgh pier in April 2019 - and mentioned in passing that he was now living on the island of Mahe in the Seychelles.
READ MORE: Your letter to the Advertiser: April 18, 2019
Why do I mention this now? Well, we were browsing Twitter recently and spotted this Tweet: “The death of John Black has rocked my life. Is there someone there that could give me details of his death? John and I were married for 17 years preceding 2000 when he moved back to Helensburgh. I am required to obtain a Death Certificate. Where was his death registered?”
The death of John Black has rocked my life. Is there someone there that could give me details of his death. John and I were married for 17 years preceeding 2000 when he moved back to Helensburgh. I am required to obtain a Death Certificate. Where was his death registered?
— Karen Acott (@acott_karen) September 30, 2020
The Tweeter joined the platform in November 2016, posted once that month in support of President Trump, and then fell silent until the above Tweet last week – which was followed a short time later by another, posting details of a company registered to John’s address in Helensburgh.
Colleagues suspected that the tweet came from a “bot” – an automated account that isn’t actually controlled by a real human being (or at least the one purporting to be responsible for the messages). So I kept quiet.
But if John has indeed passed away, Helensburgh will have lost a colourful character, if nothing else. I know his eccentric letters irritated some readers; they often infuriated me, too, but at least John pinned his colours to his mast.
READ MORE: Letters to the Helensburgh Advertiser: October 15, 2020
And his contributions, whatever we, or you, made of them, did have one great virtue: they helped us fill the letters page. (Or at least, some of them did: I’d estimate that no more than one in four of his contributions made it into print, because the rest would have landed us in some seriously hot legal water – and even the ones we did publish were almost always heavily edited to keep us on the right side of the law.)
So does anyone know what’s happened to John? Having heard from him every week – sometimes several times a week – for what felt, at the time, like a very very long period, if nothing else it would be nice to get a little bit of closure. If you can assist, drop us an email – and if you feel like taking up John’s mantle, and helping fill our letters page with eccentric, though of course legally safe, contributions, fill your boots…
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