Lavinia Humphries – 12th May 1963 – 21st February 2010
Lavinia Humphries was very much of the old school. A smoker, drinker, intravenous drug user, advocate of promiscuity, brown showers and scrabble, she was one of the most popular writers in her Islington flat.
Born in the middle of the swinging 60s to sometime licensed hangman and full time Pig stretcher Boris Humphries and his wife Air Vice Marshall Monty Thrupp, Lavinia showed promise as a writer and bothersome shite at an early age, when she wrote her first published piece ‘everyone knows Christine does it up the arse’ on a desk at St Benedict’s Catholic High School for Girls and Daughters of those in peril on the Serpentine in Wandsworth.
Upon leaving the school, she was told to return as it had only been one day and there were another 13 years of education before university.
And it was while at St Agnes College, Cambridge that she further developed her talent for literature. She read books and toilets walls, before seeing her thesis on graffiti and sexual insult published by Virago in 1982.
Lavinia then embarked on a full time career in journalism, writing for the leading papers of the day until they told her to stop.
It was in 1983 that she met Roger Nackswell, the newspaper editor who became her lover, husband, lover and finally plumber. They married in October 1984.
But Lavinia’s vices, of which Roger had full knowledge due to his part-time job as copper’s nark, started to take their toll. Although she managed to conceal the worst ravages of her lifestyle for most of the 1990s, a disastrous appearance on Ready Steady Cook with Fern Britton in which she tried to snort flour and perform oral sex on Anthony Worrall-Thompson saw her suddenly disappear from the media spotlight.
She re-appeared in late 2009, writing pithy advice columns for the leading satire website Newsbiscuit.
On 21st February this year, she was discovered by her husband lying on the bathroom floor, with a bottle of Windolene and a needle in her arm.
She leaves her husband and a collection antique breadcrumbs.
