I’ve just picked this up from Oliver Deckard on FaceBook. I don’t yet know what happened, but wish to express my own shock and sorrow at this terrible loss. Richard was a young man with so much promise. He had so much to enjoy and so much to contribute. His loss diminishes us all. SIG

Sadly, we lost another libertarian at the weekend it seems.

I met Richard at the RAD (Rally Against Debt) on Saturday 14th May and didn’t realise at the time that he was Richard GARNER I had enjoyed reading over the years on various forums, LA articles (an example here http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/philn/philn067.htm) and the facebook. Indeed, we exchanged comments just on Friday evening about the NHS.

Then on Saturday I received a message from his family that he was missing…

There are so few of us anyway, ‘we few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ that – apart from the considerable personal tragedy of a young life cut short – the death from an active writer like Richard hits us especially hard.

When I met Richard he struck me as friendly, if a little shy. He joined the conversation and made intelligent thoughtful comments. I wish I had been more friendly in that I wished I had realised he was Richard Garner and therefore had an opportunity to tell him how much I appreciated his writing. As Jan Lester once said to me, “fellowship is important” and we have much to learn from Epicurus who believed that friendship was so important that we should spend as much time with our friends as we possibly can; indeed so much so that we should never eat a meal alone even if we can eat with a friend.

From the comments now appearing on his wall http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=512489388 it seems that Richard exemplfied this; he was indeed a great and loyal friend. He went out of his way to show support for his friends. This was remarked on by those even at the opposite political spectrum who were at times ‘offended’ by his expressed views.

Let us libertarians be Medusian; cut one of us down and we grow two more. And let us make that special extra effort to engage in fellowship. I will take this opportunity to thank Matt Davies and others for making the effort to come down that day of the RAD and of course Annabelle Fuller for organising it. Also I want to thank Philip Chaston for the engaging conversation and debate we had afterwards over coffee as well as others I talked to in the Westminster Arms later.