MEMORIESOFA

There’s a photograph somewhere in my ‘travel’ archive that I have been trying to put my hand on these past couple of weeks. I am on the back of an open truck in the Wadi Rum desert in southern Jordan. A caravan of camels and their minders can just be seen trickling away into the distance as those of us perched on the pick-up-style truck smile for the camera on a September evening 11 years ago.

Beside me is Conor Caffrey, with a slightly awkward-looking smile on his face. He was never one for grinning inanely for the camera for the sake of it, and yet Conor, whom I had met for the first time just a few days earlier on that particular press trip, was a photographer himself. A terrific one. A specialist travel photographer with an incredible talent.

He was also a writer, a travel and fiction writer. And he was a scientist, too.

He was, in other words, a man of myriad talents, across a number of disciplines, a man who would have put the rest of us in that pickup truck to shame when it came to accomplishments.

Yet he wore his brilliance lightly and in the subsequent decade that I was privileged enough to be his friend, I never heard Conor boast about any of his achievements. Rather, he could be self-critical and self-doubting to the point of driving you round the bend at times.