On 27 January 2020 at 21:20 GMT, Lee sent me this message:
As a final rumination, lately I have been thinking along these lines, which might be a kind of epitaph:
‘People ask, am I happy now I have retired? The truth is, I retired because now I’m happy. The times I grew up in, and the place, and my family, all left me with an implacable horror of being mediocre. Finally, after all these years, I have grown to accept I escaped that fate.’
In his tidy, precise way, he had sent it neatly pre-packaged in quotation marks.