He wasn’t my grandad. But I hung on his words as if he was. I valued his outlook. More times than not agreeing with everything he said.
I met Richard for the first time back in 2008 I think. It was at one of the blog awards. We stood at a table and we shared stories and craic for hours. I also met his funny and wonderful daughter K8 the Gr8 that night. He was a well spoken, plainly spoken, funny and very wise man. His geek streek was almost as bad as mine. I loved his posts about Windows and the posts where he was exploring a new Linux distribution. I also loved his posts about the old days in RTE.
I heard the news about his death last week. I knew it was coming soon. I had Emailed him at the start of this month and his response promised to write when he had a little more energy and privacy. But unfortunately, that energy never came and nore too did his follow up Email.
I know I only met the man once but I have been reading his rambles and I have been talking to him ocasionally by Email for almost two decades. I really feel like I’ve lost a friend. I lay awake thinking about it last night.
I haven’t been good at posting to this blog for over a decade now. But I wanted to write something here today to mark his passing and mark the character that I will really miss.
Head Rambles.
I was wondering about Granddad tonight, having not visited https://headrambles.com/ for some time (for no particular reason – I went in and out of his blog over the years in phases). I was greeted with “This site can’t be reached” somewhat ominously and then found your own post, for which thank you, about him and his death, which I found very sad, firstly because he has died and secondly because it seems his blog has gone to Heaven with him.
Richard O’Connor, Enniskerry, please rest in peace.
William Lambton, Moylough, Co. Galway
That reminds me. I must contact his daughter again to see if I can get this back up and running.
Good luck!
Darragh. If you have a spare moment please delete the first “found” in my little tribute to Rambles and replace with “hit upon” to correct a purely semantic error: the same word repeated in one sentence. Richard always wrote good English! If you can oblige, you could then delete this request, to tidy up. PS Contact form on your main page is not working. Whilst there, I greatly enjoyed the uilleann pipe video.