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Photograph: Jane Bown/The ObserverĪs Pratchett needed more and more assistance, his personal assistant became more important to him. The description of the day Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna, was born, for example, is so animated by love, it’s as if this treasured moment was a jewel that Pratchett placed in Wilkins’s care, to ensure it would not be stolen away by the embuggerance. His closeness to the subject means that the book is sometimes joyfully, sometimes painfully, intimate. Moments like that can supplant your memories of what a person was like before here, Wilkins, who started working for the author in 2000, attempts to recover Pratchett pre-dementia. He once accidentally donated £50,000 to Bath Postal Museum, for instance.

There are heartbreaking and funny stories in A Life With Footnotes – started by Pratchett himself but written and completed by his longtime assistant Rob Wilkins – about the things that Pratchett’s shrinking brain made him do. He got Pratchett through the back of his cerebral cortex and shrank his brain, something he referred to as “an embuggerance”.Ĭaring for someone who has dementia is an overwhelmingly vivid experience, full of pain and comedy. The Death who stalks Pratchett’s Discworld is a lonely, bewildered figure, unable to understand why he’s possibly not the ideal person to adopt a little girl, or why people are unsettled by the idea of him dressing up as Santa.

No one else has written about death in a way that would make a nine-year-old want to play with him. Few people have written as much about death as Pratchett. While they can’t keep complete order in the city, they try their best.T he day Terry Pratchett died, in 2015, my nine-year-old made a model of a bearded man in a big hat holding hands with Death. They would follow Vimes to the end of the Earth, and sometimes they very well do. Crossbow, and Nobby Nobbs, who is well, Nobby Nobbs. We have Angua, a werewolf lieutenant that stays far away from silver, Detritus the troll who hasn’t quite mastered Mr. The Watch, of course, has more leaders than Vimes and Carrot. They learn to work together Carrot reminds Vimes why he became a policeman in the first place, and Vimes grounds Carrot to adjust to the city’s morally grey area. Vimes decides to take charge before Carrot gets in trouble arresting the Thieves Guild, and when a dragon attempts to usurp Patrician Vetinari, the leader of the city. He planned for Carrot Ironfoundersson, a human foundling raised by dwarves, to enter the city, rescue the citizens from the dragon, and take over the story. Terry Pratchett didn’t expect Sam Vimes to rise to the occasion.

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