Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times journalist, reported killed in the besieged Syrian city of Homs, was one tough woman, an old school war reporter who believed that her place was with those on the front line of the many conflicts she covered during a distinguished career.
I knew her remotely from phone conversations we had when covering the arms-to-Iraq story in the late 80s and early 90s. But it was only a few years ago in Antigua that I met her at a party held at the home of one of the Nicholson family who had established yacht chartering in the Caribbean.
Apart from the trade-mark black eye-patch, she was wearing a sarong and bikini top made from strips of torn blush-red spinnaker that had been destroyed in a yacht race that afternoon.
There'd been a lot of rum punch and gin going down and when a male party guest, a bit worse for wear, came up to her and asked her if she'd come in fancy dress as a pirate, she replied, matter-of-factly: "No it was shrapnel from an RPG, took my eye out in Sri-Lanka."
The guest lurched off somewhere else without appearing to have understood a thing she'd said. We had a long chat and it seemed to me she had established for herself a good life, working a chunk of the year for the Sunday Times then taking off the rest of her time to enjoy herself.
But even at parties, the reporting instinct was never buried. One of the Nicholson family began to tell us about the great parties they'd had in the 1950s and 60s with people such as John F Kennedy, J Edgar Hoover and Marilyn Monroe in attendance. "The story of those parties is one that should be told," he said.
The hapless man then found himself on a patio couch wedged between two old fashioned hacks pumping him for information. She's the kind of journalist I would like to have been, but I didn't have the balls to put myself in harm's way the way she did. Yes, whatever is said or written about Marie Colvin in any of the obituaries you will read, one thing is indisputable - the lady had balls.
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