Dear David,

I miss you.  Still.

Ah, I’d planned to put this post up last Tuesday, on the twelfth anniversary of your sudden death, but I was too busy dealing with the flurry of interest in your legacy, so I know you’ll forgive me.

Instead I post it today.  I have long had an impulse to burn a copy of the award-winningly beautiful final Lean Logic, to send it to you.  And known that it is to be done on a full moon.  Somehow it has never quite been the time.  Tonight it will be.

You’d be so overcome to know how much impact your work has had, and continues to have.  Your great work has changed so many lives, yet you never saw it published.  Didn’t get to share that landmark, emotional moment of holding it for the first time.   Your moment.

I know that was partly because a book covering so many topics always felt as though it needed a little more updating, but in truth I think the bigger reason was your fear that after thirty years of your life poured into it it might go nowhere, and have no-one read it.  That would have broken your heart.

So I wanted to write now to let you know…

• Your book has proved so popular that a fan, Matthew Taylor, was inspired to build a custom online version, in a format so well suited to your creation, available completely free, and getting ever more popular — now accessed every ten minutes or so, from all over the world.
• I produced from Lean Logic a paperback, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy, which I know often acts as a ‘gateway drug’ to your masterwork, and narrated an audiobook version of the same.
• The books have sold in the tens of thousands, received over 80 academic citations already — despite not being academic books — and continue to sell more each year than the year before.
• BAFTA award winning director Peter Armstrong made a feature film about your enduring influence — The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation? — which continues to be screened regularly nearly three years after launch.
• Several colleges have run courses based in your work, including Sterling College’s ongoing Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time programme and community, which is becoming ever more popular and potent.
• A new charitable foundation has recently been set up inspired by your insights.
• Political interest in your ingenious TEQs system for ameliorating climate change and energy shortages continues to grow.  It’s still what we desperately need, much as I can’t see it getting through our politics to unscathed implementation any time soon.
• Movements and communities drawing directly on your principles continue to grow and thrive around the world.
• And perhaps what would delight you most of all, with your endless focus on culture, your work has inspired several songs, and even a band named Lean Logic!

So many people who never met you wish they could pull up a chair and chat with you about the times we’re in.  Nothing would have given you greater pleasure.  But perhaps none long for it as intensely as I do, having had that honour.  What I wouldn’t give for another ‘lean drink’ together in The Old White Bear.

A selection of interviews with David Fleming

Did I mention that I miss you..?

Thank you David.  You changed my life, and continue to change so many others.

Rest well, my dear friend.  And hopefully I might see you amidst the flames later.