StampCollector

My friend Lola has been killed, far from home, in a car crash in Bolivia.

Lola was an old friend, but one of the best: she was one of those who drift out of your life without fanfare, only to float back in years later bigger, better and chippier than ever before.

We first met in Leeds in 1998, two hopeful young journalists thrown together to edit the comment pages of the student newspaper. We found ourselves a great foil for each other; both of us secretly harboured a geekiness that we worked to wrap in blanket of university cool. I had a passion for page layout and the Middle East, while Lola started a rumpus with the National Union of Students over newspaper censorship, funding, or some such detail. Her dogged persistence led to nationwide coverage in the Independent.

She graduated a year before me, and we began that long drift apart. Out of the blue – or so it seemed – Lola was named a Young European of the Year, won an internship with Glenys Kinnock and then moved to Brussels permanently to work for a Labour MEP, Richard Howitt if I remember rightly. I can vaguely remember the slightly frustrated cries of complaint as she realised that down this path was a life of politcs, bureaucracy and electioneering. Being expected to knock on doors in far-flung parts of the country in the name of the Labour party didn’t seem to energise Lola. She found that the myopic life of a party cadre failed to reflect the world’s shades of grey. She headed home, back to journalism, and to the BBC.

There our paths diverged. Lola, a Midlander, went to work in Birmingham, while I, a Londoner, stayed down south. Our paths crossed again only by chance. In 2004 I joined the BBC, and who should I bump into, almost literally, on one of my first days at TV Centre but Lola Almudevar, down from the regions for some training jolly in the big smoke. Emails occasionally trickled between us, and there was a brief meeting in a pub in Victoria, but nothing else.

I found Lola for the final time lurking in the corner of my eye, carrying an armful of pints away from a bar at a festival in the summer of 2006. I hesitated as she turned away and walked back towards the sunshine; I wasn’t quite sure if it really was her. It looked like Lola, but it might not be. Grasping the nettle, I called her name. She turned around, broke into a big smile and burst out laughing. That’s how she did things.

It was just this year that our friendship found its feet again. In February Lola left England to head for South America. I wasn’t privy to her decision-making, but the way she told it, it was time for a change. Half-Spanish, her ability to speak openly and honestly with the people she met on her travels meant her blog entries from Bogota, Buenos Aires and Bolivia offered a different, more informed viewpoint on the events and the people she saw and met along the way. Her natural inquisitiveness, intelligence and sense of justice permeated everything she wrote. She was a keen observer of people, with a gift for finding the pulse of a place. Her writing was free and untethered by the demands of any news organisation. It was a delight to read.

It was inevitable that she would not want to come home. Having tried my own hand at foreign reporting in the Middle East a few years ago, we struck up an email dialogue, Lola asking me for advice, tips, fortitude. Lola felt sure she could contribute, felt sure she carve out some kind of niche in so large a continent. She quickly settled on Bolivia.

Bolivia quickly settled on her, too. Before I even knew she had set up shop – before she even knew she had either, I think – my phone rang one evening. It was a crackly line with a familiar chippy voice coming from far away. Somehow, on day one, Lola had found herself inside President Evo Morales’ inner circle. There was a chance of an interview with the man himself, the first Indian president of a South American country, a man who symoblises the divide which runs through Bolivian society and which attracted Lola to the country in the first place. She sniffed a story, and wanted me to help her out.

Over the next few weeks we corresponded regularly. Over some glum Easter nights as I worked the night shift in London I counselled her to find the people behind the news, not to try and report all the news in one go. She began playing to her strengths, winning over editors in different corners of the BBC and in newspapers like the Guardian. She came up with winning story ideas, worked hard, wrote well, and took colourful, absorbing photographs. Her radio skills and that keen eye of hers won her slots on the BBC’s showpiece foreign affairs programme, From Our Own Correspondent, where it always made me laugh to hear Lola’s sing-song voice squeezed into the BBC’s muted cadences.

By a quirk of fate, Lola is – was – pretty much the only person to regularly use one of my email addresses. With a click of my mouse I can see a whole inbox of Lola Almudevar. In there is the evidence of how she found her feet and quickly started running. There are excited exchanges about my own upcoming trip to South America, six-month adventure with a visit to Lola right at its core. In an email sent just a few days ago, she had promised to show me and my girlfriend the best of Bolivia, and had laughed – I swear I could hear her – as she told me how she had randomly met my cousin last week when he was sent to La Paz on a business trip. He had something of the Blenford about him, Lola wrote.

I can’t imagine that anyone else had much of the Lola in them. She was unique, and we are all the worse for losing her.

Adam Blenford

You can read another tribute here, from someone who knew her more recently than most of us.

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