I have hanging above my desk a photograph taken by Tim Page in Cambodia at Prey Veng in 1993 during the United Nations Transitional Authority (UNTAC) in Cambodia. This was a United Nations peacekeeping operation in that country from 1992 to 1993. According to Wikipedia, this was the first occasion in which the UN directly assumed responsibility for the administration of an independent state, rather than simply monitoring or supervising the area. The photograph rather echoes, for me at least, Théodore Géricault’s painting of The Raft of the Medusa, painted in 1818-19.
Sadly Tim died 24th August 2022 in Brisbane,
Australia. He very kindly gave us the photograph as a thank you for staying
with us, when he was last in the UK. A more than generous gift.
I first met Page in Los Angeles. He was living in the Echo Park district of the city. It was 1978 and a mutual friend Ernie Eban had requested I bring back a suit that he had stored at Tim's place in Los Angeles. As I was going to LA, Ernie thought it a good opportunity to get the suit back. On arrival at the apartment, it was suggested that I should take the entire suitcase back to London. This was quite beyond expectations, but I did take the suit and a couple of notebooks back to London. There was a coffee on offer and we sat in his front room next to a pot plant, from which we periodically pulled leaves to roll up and smoke. It turned into a very pleasant and lovely late morning into afternoon. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, it was a classic California dreaming December day. I next saw Tim in London, six months later, when he came to see a theatrical production of Michael Herr’s book Dispatches adapted for the stage by Bill Bryden at the Cottesloe Theatre in June of 1979. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, it was an unusual June day in London, and it turned into a very lovely evening with some of the leaves that somehow remained of that pot plant in Echo Park.
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