RIP Ric Mac...
Ric Mac's wife explains...
"[Richard] died at his local hospice, as he wished it. The funeral was on 10th October... I have just read your memorial message of 21st October. Thank you so much! I had never seen any of Richard's musings before and they are such a wonderful reminder of my darling, talented, funny husband. I won't lie, I have cried a lot this morning, but the fact that you have kept and posted his messages, well, that's the best gift anyone could have given me. Wishing you strength and all the very best." Cheryl
And now, on with the tribute, several years in the making...
Hello. I'm Ric Mac...
...and I'm a pal of David's. Though I've never had the privilege of meeting him in person, we've enjoyed an email correspondence for a number of years. I think we discovered we have much in common.
I first "met" David through his Avengers Forever website, though that was a brief acquaintance. Some years later, I again came across his online presence via David Builds a Home. I was awed by his vision and tenacity, and subsequently followed his progress with great admiration. I emailed David to tell him so. We've been putting the world to rights ever since.
I'm English (somebody
has to be), but I'm not obsessively proud of my nationality, especially in recent years. I'm a born Yorkshireman and that
means far more to me.
The White Rose,
forever! I'm a family man with a wife and grown-up offspring.
Like David, I have varied interests and fascinations. We both have a deep appreciation of the natural world, its flora and fauna, a liking of cinema and a love of music, in all of which I think we both have wide-ranging tastes.
For donks* now, I've been plaguing David with a deluge, a veritable firehose, of random thoughts and opinions, from boyhood shenanigans to verbal snapshots of Britain's (and Yorkshire's) history and culture, and he's had the patience to read the whole of it with exceptionally good grace. There are additional diversions, tangents, variations and connections in what I've written.
Well, I guess David liked (at least some of) what I've written, as he kindly offered some of his bandwidth to display my idle musings, and to curate this adjunct to his own writing and interests. It's generous of him and I'm grateful... But not as grateful as I am for his friendship.
—Ric Mac
* "Donks" is an abbreviation of the English expression "donkeys' years", meaning a very long time. There's a lot of this kind of parenthetical addition to what I write.
Stomping grounds
Out and about
- Around Aldbury
- Hampstead Heath
- Hordron Edge stone circle
- Notes from a small island
- St Albans
- Wandering the West Country
- Wandering Welsh Wales
- Yellerbelly Country
Random jottings
- Ceci n'est pas une pipe...
- Critters
- The curious case of the crooked spire
- The Dark Ages
- Four legs and at least two grapes
- Ilkley Moor
- Industrial archeology
- Irish vignette, 1975
- Junk
- Just connecting you, caller...
- The last resort
- Make a coffee and grab a cat
- Money
- Tomato soup, eh?
- Yesterdays
Much ado about entertainment
- Britcoms
- Cops and robbers
- Less spandex, more spacesuits
- My life in espionage
- What makes Roger Rabbit Run?
The English language
As Wilde says, "[the British] have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language" and, while there are, obviously, many points of commonality and convergence, there are also differences in customs, experience and terminology which might bear a little more illumination.