TO: Mr. Teroo and aramco + anyone else interested.
Following recent posts about member "Claymore" (Brian), including the above post plus a separate thread on the Scroll Saw section by aramco, I have just been in contact with Brian by E-mail. "Short and sweet", all is unfortunately not very well with him right now:
1. On 21st January next year it will be exactly 1 year since his wife Ruth died unexpectedly. She was taken to hospital with what was assumed to be flu, and 7 hours later she was dead. Not surprisingly this has caused Brian a lot of upset and on-going natural depression, especially since he lived alone with just Ruth and their little dog.
2. Recently he himself has been diagnosed with some form of cancer and is now receiving radio therapy. He'll have to wait until early next year to know whether or not this has worked successfully.
3. As I said in a reply to a post by aramco, I did not think that Claymore sold his work via the Internet, especially the Intarsia birds and other wild life he's posted here in the past. That turns out to be only partly true - he does/did have an arrangement with his local wildlife visitor centre where his designs, made exclusively for them, are/were sold through that centre. But in addition both he and Ruth sold other wild life stuff via, I think, their own internet etsy shop. Like the local wildlife centre designs, these items were also exclusive to themselves and were sold accordingly. But from somewhere or other someone else has picked up at least some of these designs and Brian has now had to pay a substantial sum of compensation to at least one customer as his designs are now being copied - and "down-priced" as well of course!
As a result of all that he has removed all his work and pictures from UKW (and all other internet sites he frequented), which is why searches here do not now show any results for work by Claymore.
I do appreciate that the above, especially item 3, raise a number of questions. But apart from replying to Brian and making this post here, as he asked me to, I have not felt it at all reasonable to be asking him for more details at this stage. I'm sure he has, to say the least, "other priorities" right now.
Brian has asked me to inform those UKW members who have noticed his absence to pass on his thanks for their interest and he's assured me that he will be back on UKW later on, when he feels up to it. In the meantime he is working on other new designs which he will take care to keep under his direct control in future.
I hope that info fills a gap and am sure that others here join me in wishing Brian a speedy recovery and a satisfactory return to a "new" scrolling life.
