As I was saying the other day, in my job it really pays to keep track of what’s going on in the media. Sometimes this can be a bit of a bore, but sometimes I come across something really interesting that I wouldn’t otherwise have heard about.

I make a point of reading The Guardian’s Other Lives section. If you know an interesting person who has recently died you can write a short obituary which gets published at the bottom of the main Obituaries page. Summaries of remarkable lives lived in relative obscurity, these short pieces are frequently far more interesting than the paper’s ‘proper’ obituaries.

One of the best I’ve read recently was about English teacher Dennis Earl, who spent most of his life teaching in northern England and setting off quiet revolutions in the way that only English teachers can.

Today’s Other Life is about Tom Johnson, ‘..a copywriter, a night-fighter navigator and a wonderful wordsmith’. A fine individual, and proof that we copywriters don’t just spend our lives sitting behind keyboards worrying about apostrophes.