On the death of a “real friend”.

Very sad to read, via another blogging friend from the old days Garret Vreeland, of the death of Mark Wood, writer of the marvellous wood s lot.

I just referred to both Mark and Garret as friends – but I have met neither of them.

This prompted the recollection of the following story from my book in the chapter on “real friends”:

Way back in the early days of blogging, when it was a much smaller world, I read a wonderful blog by called “wood s lot” by Canadian Mark Wood. Mark still does a remarkable job of curating fascinating content from quality sources around the web and I got a lot of value from his remarkable ability to spot interesting content. Mark didn’t blog much about himself but one day he announced that he was going to have to stop blogging because he wasn’t going to have access to a computer.

This was a real blow as I loved reading his blog and I found myself wondering why he wasn't going to have access. Was he going in to hospital? Was he running out of money? Was he about to be arrested?? I realised that I didn’t care what the reasons were – I just wanted him to be able to keep blogging. So I decided to set up a PayPal account and encourage people to donate money to enable Mark to buy a computer. I blogged about this and by the end of the day we had several hundred dollars in the account. I arranged for this to be transferred to Mark and he kept blogging.

I never did really find out the circumstances, and I never knew for sure that the money was spent on the computer, all I know is he kept blogging. So was this friendship? I don’t know – maybe is it something different. But it is not nothing.