Not surprisingly, Richard was a regular in casualty at the Western and equally unsurprisingly, he hated all hospitals with a passion, as he had to go there so often. On one occasion when he’d just been stitched up, a nurse told him “You’ll need to come back” but Richard replied straight away, “No. My mummy’s a nurse, and she’ll take my stitches out.” By the time he was 18, his file was ten times as big as everyone else’s at the eye pavilion up at the Royal. The upside was that Richard was very bright. He knew from an early age that he was going to have to make his way with his brain so he was particularly good at technology at school. He took after his dad in being practical, but as Brian says, Richard was better, because he was clever. Which could be very annoying in an argument. Richard was always right. He was also unmovable but because he was always so sure of his facts and because he had usually checked them beforehand, you had to admit he was right. Richard was very good at mechanical and electronical things; he could disassemble and reassemble almost anything and make it better. That began with bikes and remote control cars and then went on to model aeroplanes. There would be spacers on the wheels and a new body shell and of course, modifications to make them to go faster. Much, much faster… He and Jamie Sutherland became friends at Trinity. Jamie told me that Richard used to hang with the cool kids at first but later on their hobbies converged in tech drawing and they linked up – he noticed how talking about engines made Richard’s eyes light up. As they grew older they got into scooters and before Richard was 15, his front garden motorbikes and became the scooter workshop as a result they had a very oily garden path for many years and his mum remembers how Richard and Jamie were brought back by the police one evening for riding on the old railway lines…. Under age and without lights or a helmet… In those days Richard had a really longhaired rough coated Neanderthal dog called Zak. It had a spike of hair on its Head that made it look like a character in Gremlins and for 18 years Zak went everywhere Richard went - apart from on the back of the scooter.