MANOFMYRIADTALENTS
that Conor is gone?
On that Jordan trip when we discovered, coincidentally, that we both lived in Greystones (he a native, me just a blow-in), we bonded together and became firm friends – first with each other and then, in a wider way, when my husband Gerry and his wife Gill joined the throng. I didn’t fully recognise back then how special Conor was. But I came to admire him greatly.
For here was a person who refused to play the game. Conor couldn’t be bothered with all the nonsense that surrounds so much of what is deemed to be ‘travel journalism’. He was a freelance writer and photographer. Any press trip he accepted he did so on the basis that this was work, this was something that, yes, he loved, alright, but he was here because this was how he earned his living.
So you’d never find Conor in the hotel bar, for example, in the wee small hours. Indeed, you’d be much more likely to find that he had set his alarm for 5am so that he could head out with his camera to capture some particular dawn image he had in his head. He was dedicated to his craft.
Just as he was dedicated to his family – to Gill, his ‘dream girl’ as he called her, and to his children, Caoimhe, Oisín and Saoirse. Caoimhe was his only child when I first met him and I remember him telling me, as we wandered the Red Sea shores of Aqaba together, how the highlight of his toddler daughter’s endless journeys to the airport, to deposit or collect her travelmad father, was spotting the giant Coca Cola bottle outside the Point in Dublin. It’s funny how things stick in your mind.
Conor loved Spain and spoke the language, of course. But the one place I recall him talking to me about with the greatest passion was Botswana. It bowled him over.
And so, in these dark days since he left us a month ago, I like to think of him wandering there amid the beauty of the Okavango Delta, birdlife all around, camera at the ready… and at peace with the world.