I recently drew up a list of topics I wanted to cover in my Revisiting Old Memories series in the future, and then selected a topic using a random number generator. Here is the blog post on that topic, which is based in part on a post I wrote for my ‘the prof speaks out’ Google blogspot on 5 October 2008. [I’ve made some slight revisions to the original post].
In mid-September 2008, I gave a talk on recovery at a ‘Who Cares?’ Carers’s conference in Gloucester. I had been invited to the conference by Andrea Wilson, and Ian and Irene MacDonald, and was given a 90-minute slot. My current partner Linda had come over from Australia to visit me in Wales, and she attended the conference as well.
Ian MacDonald had first contacted me about five years earlier and we had met several times over the years. He and Irene had lost their son Robin to a heroin overdose, and since then they had set up Carer and Parent Support Gloucestershire (CPSG), which provided one-to-one support sessions. You can read Ian and Irene’s Recovery Story here and a blog post about my visit to see them last year here.
In my last blog post, I described how I met Ian and Irene MacDonald at their home on the outskirts of Cheltenham during my last trip to the UK in September 2022.
After leaving Wulf and Melanie Livingstone’s house in North Wales, I headed to Ian and Irene MacDonald’s home in the outskirts of Cheltenham. I first met Ian Macdonald at the FDAP (Federation of Drug & Alcohol Professionals) Annual conference in 2007; we had previously corresponded about a few articles that I posted on our news portal Daily Dose. We hit it off immediately. Ian told me how he and Irene had he had lost their 27-year-old son Robin to an accidental heroin overdose in November 1997.
