I have written briefly in the Guardian recently about the life and work of my former classmate Andy West who died in the summer, or at least some of it. Andy has left a large archive of his work, as well as documentation of his many and varied interests on his BabelStone website. His travels in China and in Tibet in the early 1980s captured in his Twitter archive, and more recently in his BlueSky account are well worth reading through. Other appreciations, each focus on a different area of his work, can be found here (in Chinese), especially about his Sinological achievements, here (about his interest in Ogham stones), and here (on his work with Unicode and involvement in script encoding initiatives relating to various languages. When asked, his former classmates almost without fail recalled his linguistic gifts, his generosity, and his headwear, not least of all the plastic lobster hat seen here in Chengde in 1985 (source: his Twitter archive).