Charlotte’s childhood home is in a small suburb in High Wycombe in the south of England. Her favorite meal at the local pub is pie and chips with an extra portion of chips. Her mother Christina shared this with me over lunch (without the extra chips), but I wish I had heard it from Charlotte herself, who died suddenly in Australia in March.
Charlotte and I met while working together at VICE News in the mid-2010s. Because it was a job that didn’t pay top dollar—but conferred a kind of status among those who cared—VICE frequently attracted misfits who admired its social cachet as much as its approach to storytelling. It was a place for deadpan women with sanpaku eyes and twinkish libertines in streetwear. There were excellent journalists, but the broader enterprise was an aesthetic one, and the boundaries of good taste were policed quietly but firmly by those who ran the show.
Charlotte liked the absurdity of it all. “It’s kind of like being in a clique at an American high school,” she wrote to me. “Except the teachers are throwing the parties.” She possessed a warm and occasionally manic energy that was infectious. We quickly became friends, and had a few things in common, including a background in Devon. She was born in Torquay to her mother Christina Meredith, a lecturer, and her father Michael Mason, a GP who died in 2010. She moved to Buckinghamshire aged five and attended Sir William Borlase’s Grammar School. She went to Kingston University to study English Literature, where she excelled, receiving a first class honors and the English Literature Prize. She worked as a researcher at the Iris Murdoch Archives, and then completed an MA in journalism, cutting her teeth at publications like the Daily Express, Metro, HuffPo, and the Independent.
She was fiercely intelligent and open with an attendant vulnerability that left her isolated at times. A voracious reader, she introduced me to J.G. Ballard, who I loved, and loaned me two or three of his books, which I never returned. She had a love of horror from Ari Aster to Stephen King. We swapped Bjenny Montero cartoons and Midsommar memes, went to parties together, and she briefly dated one of my friends. We both liked seagulls, which I’d tried to keep as pets as a teenager. Charlotte sent me some pictures of gulls she’d drawn as a child. This became, as these things do, a motif in our messages to each other: endless pictures and videos of seagulls.
We spent an unhealthy amount of time at The Old King’s Head pub near the office, drinking Guinness and fretting over our future career prospects. When VICE News eventually folded, our boss found Charlotte a job in a sister part of the company in Australia, and she moved there in 2016. We continued to message. The dispatches from Australia were never dull. “He admitted he was smoking meth for two months straight the other day,” went one. “Told his ex he’d be surfing up coast all weekend and went to some old guy’s house and smoked.” I would wake up to pictures of giant moths and huntsman spiders (‘it charged me like an angry rhino’), as well as stunning landscapes that made me wonder why I’d stayed in London.
Charlotte came back to the UK about once a year, usually staying with me for a few days in London. It took her time to find her feet, but she never expressed any desire to move back. She loved Australia for its natural beauty, quality of life, and sense of adventure. She sent pictures of the Blue Mountains, the wildfires, and the beach. “I don’t like people,” she once wrote to me. “But I love space and nature.”
In 2019 Charlotte moved to SBS in Sydney where she was deputy social media editor, and then in 2021 to the Daily Mail Australia. She developed strong friendships with some of her colleagues, who remember her warmly. “We were very close,” said one. “We spent a lot of time together outside of work, running amok.” She rescued three cats—Biscuit, Cricket, and Pippi—and lived with her partner Andrew Davis, who she spoke of frequently and adoringly. “New job going well, new house v lovely,” she wrote. “Drew is wonderful as always.”
Over the years, the messages between us became less frequent, and the last time she came to stay was in Autumn 2022. My final message to her in 2023 was a Midsommar meme that didn’t get a reply. I thought about contacting her several times over the following year, but I hesitated, sensing that she had become less anchored to her life in the UK. I was overwhelmingly happy for her. I really thought that she had carved out a new life for herself in Australia, which I had no part in, and I let go.
I was wrong. Charlotte’s mental health deteriorated, and no one around her realized how bad things were until it was too late. When Charlotte slipped away, she did it decisively. It came without warning, carefully planned to minimize the harm to those she cared about.
Charlotte was 36 and will be greatly missed by her family, friends, and former colleagues.
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