This is the season of goodbyes. At the weekend I visited perhaps the most beautiful museum on earth, the Louisiana art gallery in Denmark, and stood in the sculpture park next to the beach, watching the sailboats bob across the water. It was a perfect day, and its perfection made me unhappy. It was a ready-made memory: the last day of summer, 2015.
Still, I knew it wasn’t just the fading sunshine that was making the day so bitter-sweet. On the train out of Copenhagen, I had started to read The Shepherd’s Crown. It is the final Discworld novel; its author, Terry Pratchett, died of early-onset Alzheimer’s on 12 March, leaving behind dozens of brilliant books, and dozens more left unwritten. (His assistant Rob Wilkins notes in the afterword that “we will now not know how the old folk of Twilight Canyon solve the mystery of a missing treasure and defeat the rise of a Dark Lord despite their failing memories, nor the secret of the crystal cave and the carnivorous plants in The Dark Incontinent . . . and these are just a few of the ideas his office and family know about”.)
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