Thoughts of Ian Parry

Christmas is over! Today I will age will take down the cards and remove the fairy lights and the cottage will suddenly look bare and cold.
We have New Years Eve to negotiate at the end of the week, and although I am sure we will have a good time at my sister's house, New Year's Eve is not a "holiday" that I feel I have ever really celebrated.
Mind you many years ago, we used to do the fancy dress thing! where a large group of friends and family, dressed as clowns,celebrities and cartoon characters all crammed into a motley selection of cars, dashed back and forth between the hot and sweaty pubs of North Wales.
Hummm not very subtle, but all great fun!.

All this came to an end in 1989 when, just after Christmas a close friend of mine ( and of our family) died in a dreadful plane accident. His name was Ian Parry and he was only 24, when he died, but already in a brief but very successful career as a photojournalist, he had carved out a name for himself in the hard world of Fleet street.
As I recall he had blagged his way into Romania, to document the civil unrest, and had talked his way onto a Russian cargo plane in order to get his photographs home. The plane had been shot down (though this was not proved) and Ian's sister Ruth, had been left with the awful job to informing Ian's large, young group of friends who at that time had been untouched-by-death and grief, of his sudden death.

Since that time, I have never really "celebrated" New Year....oh we have had dinner parties right enough and have enjoyed them, but since 1989, I have never jumped into the party thing ever again. For many years after, I have chosen to work nights on New Year's Eve, anything to fill that slightly depressive void and melancholy that accompanied Ian's death over a time which used to signify humour and celebration.

I am not being a drama Queen here. The sense of not wanting to "party" was a very subtle and not an overly oppressive one; which seemed to creep into my life rather than to depressingly dominate it. Christmas has always held affection in my life, and after Ian's death, I personally and simply lost my interest in celebrating New Year, which was always the poor relation.

I don't think about Ian very much anymore. Of course I always swap Christmas Cards with his sister Ruth every year,and by most late Decembers, my mind wanders briefly to those salad days when Ian gave us so much vicarious pleasure and excitement when he recalled stories of his new dynamic London lifestyle. At that time, this 24 year old man seemed to carry many of the hopes and aspirations of a backwater small Welsh town......and his zest for life galvanised a whole number of people (including myself) to move forward to reach for what they wanted..Perhaps that is a better legacy than the Ian Parry Scholarship set up in his name

hey ho

(see The Ian Parry Scholarship at) http://www.europepress.com/ian_parry/ian_parry_scholarship.htm