Remembering Dave Holmes

On the 13th of this month, it was one year on from the death of Dave Holmes.

I met Dave when I returned, tail between my legs, to the relatively new, Andromeda Bookshop and discovered that he worked there.

A friendship developed, at least from my side and since Dave never suffered fools gladly, I always assumed that he didn't completely despise me.  So, from around 1974 until I left England, in 1980, he was a regular feature in my life and in some ways, a distinct influence.

Dave managed to push me into attempting a few things, that I would not have tried to do on my own and one of them was working on the electricity wires, in his mother-in-law's house.

I was working, at that time, for the GPO (now known as British Telecom) and I had a MINOR understanding of the way electricity worked... which in Dave's mind, qualified me to fix his problem!

The job in question, was to repair the light fixture, in an under the stairs closet, that had a "pull-chain" switch built into it's base and Dave wasn't taking NO for an answer!

Well, I sweated my way through it, very carefully keeping all of the exposed wires separate from each other and working with the crappy tools he had available.  Amazingly, it worked and I didn't fry myself or the house wiring.

That was a life changing moment for me, because I was not the most self possessed or self confident personality type and Dave forced the gift of realizing that I could do things, that I didn't think I could, upon me.

I don't think that I ever told him how much that meant to me and I am sorry for that.  In the following years, much to the amazement of my Canadian wife, I was fearless in repairing/rewiring any minor electrical issues

and

it all started with Dave!

Dave and I had lost touch, reacquainted, lost touch, reacquainted and had a tenuous contact in the last couple of years before he died.  But I never forgot him and I still don't because he is woven into the fabric of my being and as someone once said,

"You are never really dead, as long as someone remembers you".

Rest in peace.

In the interests of fair play, this photograph of Dave, was borrowed from someone who posted it to Dave's Facebook page.