2017 taking over where 2016 left off

Wow first post of 2017.

Yesterday Tara Palmer-Tomkinson (or T-P-T as she preferred to be known, though it sounds like a defoliating chemical used by the US Army during the Vietnam War) died, aged merely 45-years old.  By some strange co-incidence I had been thinking about this celebrity relic from the 1990s yesterday morning.
I was dressing my little daughter for her pre-school and I was lamenting the bruises on her legs.  It made me recall T-P-T explaining her choice of footwear reflected a neurotic desire to hide her ankles which she professed to be 'ugly'.  My daughter's legs were covered by the regulation woollen tights.
It is just a coincidence because although T-P-T was discovered yesterday, neighbours had not seen her dead.  First thoughts of mine was that it was a drug overdose, given her detailed descriptions of cocaine use and other substance abuse.  Yet she had been diagnosed with a non-malignant brain tumour in 2013.  So her death is currently unexplained.  It reminds me of the film Ivan's XTC (derived from a Dostoevsky novella) about a hedonistic Hollywood agent (played by Danny Huston) who dies suddenly.  The industry and his associates (he doesn't really have friends) at a loss to explain it and with a need to gossip about it assume it was an overdose or that Ivan had AIDS.  It never crosses anyone's mind that he might have succumbed to something as prosaic (to them) as cancer.
T-P-T brief flit across the news sky was far less important than the Swedish statistician Hans Rosling.  Effortlessly charismatic, he desired to create a more fact-based world.  I first encountered him at university, not in person but on a programme he had done.  I later saw him on Newsnight explaining why global population growth will plateau using toilet rolls.  T-P-T died at 45 but she had little to contribute to the public sphere in the first place and nothing now.  But Rosling dying at 68 is too young for he could have been extolling the benefits of his knowledge for another decade and more, inspiring countless numbers to follow where he had led.
Also of immeasurable importance though from the past was Alan Simpson, one half of a writing duo with Ray Galton, producing memorably Hancock's Half Hour and Steptoe and Son.  He has died aged 87.  There are tributes galore but his working life had concluded.  There was me thinking yesterday was a slow news day and then these three tragedies in their own way occur.