And So Goodbye Ray Girvan, I knew you but never met you… July 5, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite , trackback
Some sad news via email today. Ray Girvan, a very old friend of this blog, died 30 June 2015, after a three-year fight with lung cancer. He was 59 (a victim of these speedbumps that hit 15-20% of us in late middle age), witty, knowledgeable, and had, of course, never smoked, something that tempts me to kick my Bible around the room a bit. Ray not only ran a site of his own, Journal of a Southern Bookreader. He had also, in the last years, and while ill, written a book on the nineteenth-century author Maxwell Gray (now free on creative commons and a model for a project I hope to undertake). And he wrote occasional pieces for the Devon Historical Society, where he was, for many years, webmaster. (I actually corresponded with Ray on the second site before realizing that it was ‘my’ Ray, I was writing to: I got quite the shock). Ray both gave excellent contributions to StrangeHistory through his comments (and some really good reading tips) and also gave me very great help in two of my academic articles, which when they (finally) come out I’ll pass on to his widow Clare. Just to give a sense of Ray’s range his advice for these published pieces covered the effect of shots of tequila on the perception of space; and documentation on a nineteenth-century Prussian soldier in London. An editor is trying to get rid of my footnote on tequila, but I’m going to fight for you, Ray!
Of course, the most important feature of this relationship was that I’d never met Ray (something which is true of all of you who write in to StrangeHistory): though at the beginning of the summer I and Ray had corresponded about the possibility of me coming to Exeter on my next visit to the UK. Yet he was someone who was dear to me and who I often thought of: perhaps particularly because I knew that he had to spend a lot of his time with doctors and even in chemotherapy. On reading his wife’s lovely memoriam, last night, I learnt that Ray was ‘a scientist, a mathematician, a writer (some years ago, he amassed quite a fan following for his erotic fiction, written under the name Thomas Gomez!), a website wizard, a cook, a geologist, a researcher, a fixer, a musician, a collector, a hilarious wit and general know-all.’ Well, several of these shocked me and I subsequently spent half an hour in search of Thomas Gomez… I, honestly, had thought that Ray ran a second-hand bookshop. What an insane and yet wonderful world we have created for ourselves with the internet. I only saw a photograph of the departed after his death. (To my credit I’d imagine him with a mustache and a beard and glasses…) And that makes me realize that I don’t know what any of you who write in so assiduously look like (with the exception of KMH and Ricardo). However, I have mental pictures of many (lots of beards) and I would advise you all to go and get your lungs x-rayed before it is too late because writing obituaries is not good for anyone. Deep, deep commiserations to Clare. The lines of destiny furrow human lives… Now here’s Ray playing himself out.
