RIP Malty

Some sad news. John Jobling – aka the wonderful Malty – died in September.

Malty was a prolific commenter on The Dabbler and its satellite blogs and there was no one quite like him. Actually, there was nobody remotely like him. Who can forget his idiosyncratic lexicon, peppered with unexpected Teutonisms and swipes at his bête noire, the fabled Gillywark?

In the golden age of bloggery (before social media took over) the best blogs, like The Dabbler, had a commentariat that was at least as entertaining and erudite as the actual writers. Malty was the king of them. Knowledgeable, unpredictable, wise, very funny and utterly inimitable – and with a quite extraordinary arsenal of anecdotes.

He was also a generous commenter – a stalwart eliminator of the dreaded ‘No comments’, and always with something relevant and funny.

As Nige has put it: Malty was an ‘essential, unique ornament of the blogscape, and indeed of my own mental landscape.’ I know we’d all agree with that.

Sadly he’s one of the few key Dabblers I never got to meet in real life, though it was fun to befriend him on Facebook after the Dabbler dried up. But consolingly, thanks to the imperishability of the internet, you can still read his comments and his blog posts with a bit of searching. So Malty is, in one sense, immortal. Here is a post he wrote about his life and his favourite music for ‘6 Clicks’…a sort of Dabbler version of Desert Island Discs.

RIP Malty – we’ll raise a dram. Our sincere condolences and very best wishes to his wife June and his family.

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