My former partner and friend Matthew Higham, who has died aged 79, lived a cheerfully chequered life: running away from London to Scotland as a teenager to marry his pregnant first wife, Kay, when their parents forbade it; training as a blacksmith and at the E15 theatre school in London, alongside Mike Leigh; spending a brief stint in Berlin in an undisclosed role for MI6; selling knickers at Brixton market in London and learning to drive HGVs for British Rail.
Having driven trucks to various parts of the world, in 1978 he co-founded, with his brother Ben, St Giles European Transport, a specialist antiques haulage company in Norwich, and afterwards became an antiques dealer in the city.
