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With occasion lately to be confronted with death – for the first time, personally for me – which at 42 I consider somewhat ‘lucky’ (that I haven’t had to face this type of grief before now).

My cousin, Anthony (Tony) Wright, died on the 29th of November this year. A victim, like many others in any impending UK winter, of a cold – cascading to pnuemonia, quickly leading to a heart attack and subsequently multiple organ failure…

I miss him.

With an interesting gypsy life (which by all account is the way of the ‘Wright’ line) he pudged through an exciting and, I suspect, sometimes hard life. A two week holiday to Jersey in the 1980′s led to 15 years of gypsy’ing estrangement from his UK home – Chandlers Ford, Eastleigh.

Life then served bliss in another sphere – Holland – a lovely wife and a young child – quickly followed by tragedy – the death of a 3 year old son and the subsequent disintegration of a yet ‘well formed marriage’ into divorce.

Another few years on Jersey and a ‘home-coming’ to safety and settling down didn’t quite work out – the hard Britain of the early 90′s served up unimaginably high un-employment rates and I recall stories of Tony sleeping rough under bridges in the Southampton area (and it seems from some subsequent conversation that this may be a ‘tall-tale’ – but hey – I’m sure we’ve all had one or two tall-tales in our lives…).

A gut blow was delivered shortly there-after with the death of his mother, Stella – whom he adored – in 1994…

Most in the extended family – who were re-connected to him in the mid 90′s – mis-understood him.

A pedant of high intellectual calibre, traditionally British in the nicest possible way…

I do miss him.

His alter egos – Forest Lyndhurst and Tupher Teatime (both characters in the virtual world of Second Life) – speak to both his humour and his forward-looking thinking.

I was introduced to Second Life by Tony – an irony which to this day still surprises me – me, apparently a technology afficiondo, introduced to the ‘cutting edge’ by my good mate Tony who, through his constant scanning of the the ‘current world’, had his finger on the pulse of ‘today’ in a way I never did…

I wanted to ring him today.

But, he is not here…

Not anymore.

A special human being – organised, ‘switched-on’, a societal ‘pulse-taker’.

Tony had an opinion, a strongly informed one on most things… A pub conversation on politics, religion or ‘civil service management’ were all possible on a level which would bend your mind because he was so well-read and ‘up to the minute informed’…

I feel blessed to have shared his company in my little life…

I can’t believe I can’t ring him…

God bless you my special cousin.