Sadly Bára and I will not be in Darlington next Tuesday. It is a big disappointment, as unlike many of the contributors to this thread, I met Diane in person, stayed at her place many times and corresponded in between times. She was good company, and a generous host with a keen understanding of the needs of a musician on the road. I know that she also offered hospitality to many other musicians needing a place to stay in London.

I do not visit Mudcat very often and normally never write here. However, just for the record, I'd like to say that the way I discovered, back in August, that Diane was dead was that having become increasingly worried at her lack of response to emails, Facebook messages, snail mail and also having failed to make contact by phone, I asked a friend to go round to her flat. On getting no answer to the door and seeing a big pile of post through the letter box, he called the police and they came round and upon checking their records, they were able to tell him that she had died in May.

When he relayed that news to me, I contacted Haringey Council and also managed to find an email address for her brother David that had been posted on here in 2011 at the time when I found Diane collapsed at her flat. (Some regulars here will remember that event) I sent him a message to express my condolences and to ask for more details about the circumstances of Diane's death and also the whereabouts of her grave, so that I could go and pay my respects. It turned out that he didn't know that she was dead. We have since kept in touch by email.

He contacted Haringey Council to find out for himself the circumstances of Diane's death and discovered that the council were still holding the body, as they had no contact details for family members or other people to notify. He then went ahead to deal with the situation and upon hearing that I would be on tour in England in October, he very kindly fixed the funeral date and time to coincide, so that Bára and I could be there.

Now that the original London funeral has been cancelled and a new funeral arranged up north a day earlier, I will not be there as Bára and I will be on our way to London on Tuesday.

We will be thinking of Diane and rest content that she has not had to know about all the strange and above all very sad events of the past 5 months, since her death.