Michael O’Hare. 1952-2012. Today I found myself once again regretting the fact that I did not have a half decent digital camera in the 1990’s. So please excuse the possible copyright enfringement!

I was fortunate enough to get to meet Michael for the first time at The Gathering a Babylon5 convention run by Wolf 359 in Manchester in 1995 and I will always remember that. Michael was at ease, had the audience in the palm of his hand and spoke openly about a book he’d just read … “The Road Less Travelled”. I later got hold of a copy of this book, read it and it proved a great deal of help to me at that time. “Life” it said “was difficult” and reading those words it was, and still is, an epiphany. I’m not sure now if it was the same con (time maybe a great healer, it just makes me forget stuff!) but I also remember him reading from some texts that were obviously dear to him. The opening lines to Dylan Thomas’ Hunchback in the Park. I can, to this day, still hear him speaking the words “The hunchback in the park, a solitary mister.”

A few years later I met Michael again and asked him to sign my copy of the book, which I still read when the mood takes.

My abiding memory though is of laughing myself silly in a hotel in Manchester as Michael O’Hare wove into his talks over the weekend a running gag that if you’d enjoyed his talk then please …. ” Pass any the folding money you may have to the front!” Mr. O’Hare you may no longer be among us but I still hear you.