This is Oscar Stextra.

Hello and welcome to another Oscast Extra as always with James from Gunner Blog. James, good morning to you.

Good morning to you too, Andrew. Good morning to you. How are you doing today?

I'm okay. I think I'm sort of traveling between okay, not okay and sort of existing in the middle a bit.

You know, for people who aren't aware, you know, some people I know listen to the podcast but don't read the blog or don't necessarily follow my social media.

But last week my dad died of COVID-19 and it's been a bit of a weird surreal time as you might imagine.

Sort of, you know, we've been quite lucky and that we were able to spend some time with him when I know that many families have gone through a similar situation over the last 12 months and not had that comfort.

But, you know, it's weird, you know, you have some Irish blood and you don't you? Yeah, yeah, plenty.

You know the way we do things here in Ireland. It's, you know, when somebody dies, we obviously mourn them but we celebrate them as well.

There's, you know, the Irish wake is a famous thing and, you know, you get together and you talk and you drink pints and you tell stories and you have this.

This weird thing where you're laughing your head off in the middle of a really sad situation. But it's part of helping you cope with the grief and cope with the, you know, what's going on and we don't have that, you know, we don't have that at the moment.

There are only 10 people allowed at the funeral. My daughter who hasn't been home to Ireland in over a year couldn't come back and see her granddad.

You know, you're missing all those things which help us through at a difficult time like this. So yeah, it's been up. But can I just say that, you know, today after I wrote the blog and over the last number of weeks or last week or so anyway.

I've had so many lovely messages of support and condolences from people and they really help, you know, they really help each reply today on Twitter, for example, reading somebody who liked what I wrote or who offered condolences and support and emails and all of those things.

You know, they just kind of chip away very, very slowly at the sadness, you know, and I just want people to know I appreciate them a great deal.

Yeah, and I tell you in the last few days, you wouldn't believe the number of messages I've had from people saying, you know, where's Andrew's Andrew? Okay.

And it is very touching when people get in touch and when they express their solidarity or commiserations.

Yeah, it's a lovely thing to see that kind of online space used for something so positive. Yeah, the internet can be nice. Yeah, who knew? Yeah, who knew?

No, I mean, I guess we knew, you know, that's something we've experienced certainly, but sometimes it gets forgotten, I guess, amid some of the bad stuff.

It does. It does, yeah.

And for anyone who hasn't, by the way, if you don't normally read the blog, I strongly recommend that you read Andrew's blog today about his dad. It's a really lovely tribute.

And also, you know, very typical of you, you take a personal thing and, you know, apply it to a bigger situation. But an important message really about even though it might feel,

...