Sardonic subeditor and unlikely PR consultant Keith Hepper, who died in Sydney last month, was farewelled in two cities on the day of his memorial service.

I met Keith in the 1980s when we both worked at The News in Adelaide, encountering a man who expressed a level of cynicism that makes Frank Underwood seem like Polyanna. Yet Keith redeemed his deadpan and often dreadful declarations with a soft curl of his lips and a twinkle in his eyes.

Keith was wickedly funny and it is one of the regrets of my life that I did not catch up with him more often for beer-drinking debriefs in Newtown, the Sydney suburb where he lived since returning from Adelaide.

Keith was born on June 19, 1953, and died in Newtown on March 24, 2015, so he was just 61. His partner for many years, Lisa Coleman, said Keith, who had been feeling under the weather for a few weeks, collapsed one morning from what was diagnosed as a pulmonary embolism - in a nutshell, a blood clot in his leg, found and cleared three years ago, had returned and moved up into the lungs. The seizure was quite brief and the ambulance arrived quickly, but all efforts to revive him failed.

While Lisa and Keith's family held a memorial and committal service on Thursday, April 2, in  Matraville, NSW, former colleagues from The News met at Adelaide's Robin Hood Hotel to raise a glass in his memory.

It may be 25 years since Keith left Adelaide, but the keen edge of his incisive wit cuts through that curtain of time as friends shared their  favourite Hepper tales, including his legendary mock front page of Rupert Murdock's takeover of the Herald Weekly Times.

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