In memory of Edward Teague, aka Lord Patel, aka Top Secret Postman Patel

Edward was my friend of almost 50 years, since our undergraduate days, when we attended many of the same classes.

The greatest joy of Edward's life was surely women, particularly Lesley, Sara and Abigail. But he had a great gift for male companionship and enjoyed a wide circle of well-informed and entertaining friends.

In a career that spanned a stint in the Manchester cotton trade, the proprietorship of a bookstore, the directorship of an art gallery, and the founding of a software development company that traded throughout the world, Edward perhaps never came closer to finding his true vocation than during his last years as a Web observer and commentator.

Due to failing eyesight and a devilishly defective computer keyboard, his spelling and punctuation were idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, he gained a wide following by demonstrating that one honest and perceptive individual can tell you something more useful than the New York Times and the whole of Poop Murdoch's media empire combined.

Edward's love of words, both written and spoken, was deep. "Lachrymose, "paradoxical" and "apochryphal" were typical of the polysyllabic expressions that decorated his discourse. Yet he was never pompous or boring, and could deploy monosyllabic anglo-saxon cuss words with a skill and elegance in that noble language which Mark Twain could only have approved.

But that fails to capture the originality of Edwards speech, the freedom with which he created novel constructions and his affinity for the vivid phrase. On a late-mailed greeting card to Canada he scrawled "fly it;" someone making a hasty getaway from the scene of a political demonstration "took a runner;" a windfall on the stocks prompted a gleeful "lubbley jubbley." Perhaps his life was more compartmented than most of us knew, and that beyond the circle of family, business associates and more-or-less respectable friends he had dealings also with advertising copy writers, purse snatchers and poets.

As a schoolboy naturalist, Edward published a "Flora of the Dovey Estuary," which if copies are extant, could well provide a useful benchmark for students of temporal change in Welsh estuarine ecosystems.

The flora was among the first in a stream of written items --letters to friends, newspaper editors, and politicians, essays and stories. It was only natural, therefore, that Edward would turn to the Web as a mode of self-expression.

Before launching his own blog, Edward wrote, among other things, guest columns for William Bowles; a regular column in the ingeniously named but now sadly defunct, pan-European publication "EEYOO;" and occasional items for my Web publication, naturalSCIENCE, including a review of Karl Sabbagh's A RUM AFFAIR How Botany's "Piltdown Man" was Unmasked, which as it turned out, had more hits (over 30,000 at last count) than the book had sales, notes about Nuna beans, Xeno-estrogens, and the herbal stimulant Qat, and an obituary of Alan Osborne, pioneer of PC's for people.

A search of the Web would no doubt yield many other examples of Edward's broad-ranging interest in science, society and politics. Nothing, however, more sharply focused his attention than the post-9/11 transition of Western democracy to an Orwellian system of top-down control through media-enabled lies and propaganda. His "Mein Kampf by George W. Bush and Tony Blair," a old piece that I discovered for the first time while browsing the net today, exemplifies his anger and resistance. The same impulse, which was later to power his blog, was perhaps never more brilliantly manifest than in the piece Bush's gang of mad beekeepers, a near exact advance history of the Iraq war and its doleful aftermath, which was published before the first salvo of cruise missiles launched the Anglo-American assault on Baghdad.