When his partner David died in 2019, the Reverend Richard Coles found himself alone for the first time in 12 years. Here, he talks to Tom Lamont about grief – and the strange moments it brings
Often, these days, the vicar and broadcaster Richard Coles bicycles from his parish in Finedon to a church in a neighbouring Northamptonshire village, where he sits by the grave of his late husband David. The pair had been married for a decade when David died suddenly at the end of 2019. Like many couples, they had developed between them a rich system of mutual mockery – mockery that Coles sees no reason to abandon in his widowerhood. “It’s such a trope of sentimental films, isn’t it? That you sit by the lost one’s grave and talk to them. But actually one of the conversations I have with David in death is to take the piss out of him. I tease him for lying in ignominy, now, in such an insalubrious corner of the churchyard. He would have hated it. He did like his luxuries.”
Listeners to BBC Radio 4, where this 59-year-old reverend can be heard presenting Saturday Live every week, as well as readers of his two books of autobiography (soon to be joined by a third, The Madness of Grief, out next month) will recognise the above as a characteristic statement by Coles. More so than any public-facing religious figure I can think of, he is dry, funny and unstintingly personal in his pronouncements. Chatting today from his study in the vicarage, sitting at “a desk covered in crap” on a bright afternoon, he will be frank about his marriage, his bereavement, and his year of grief to date. He will also discuss his late husband’s addiction to alcohol, an addiction that eventually killed him.
