St Martin in the Fields was packed on Wednesday for Ewen Balfour’s memorial service where there wasn’t a dry eye for the loss of this happy man. He was one of those people who you think is your own personal best friend and when they’ve gone you discover there are thousands like you. There were contributions from the organisations he helped, often without anyone else knowing – he cycled round India and Vietnam to raise money for deaf children – and the music from The Sixteen and English Touring Opera singers was another kind of testament. His boss, Alan Parker, the creator of Brunswick Communications, said Ewen had been sent along by his father, Sir Peter Parker, as “a good man, a great contributor”, which sums him up nicely. But there was so much more to him, as Alan said: his contacts book was compendious and anarchic, ‘with “Pie Shop” next to “Prime Minister”’, and he was ‘ruthlessly uncommercial – his contribution was much more complex than that’. Working with Ewen was clearly like living with him – ‘he was a lot of fun, a lot of life’.