The Dragon’s Heir

A Tribute To a True Friend

For Peter Risdon

There are people who enter your life like mythic forces - not because they’re flawless, but because they strike something eternal in you. Something waiting to be lit.

Peter Risdon was that force for me. A true embodiment of the dragon archetype: sharp, principled, fire-eyed, unafraid to name things as they were - even when it hurt, especially when it mattered.

I was in my twenties. Searching. Full of energy but unformed, the product of a working-class upbringing where philosophy wasn’t something you inherited - it was something you stumbled toward, if you were lucky, or desperate enough. I had no map, just a burning curiosity and the feeling that something vital was missing from the world around me.

Peter appeared.

I met him in a local pub in small town in Cambridgeshire we both lived in at the time. Him in a thatched cottage - me on a council estate with my then girlfriend (who ultimately gave me two daughters that I ended up raising alone for 11 years). He stood at 6’7”. He was educated and well spoken but with a deep, booming voice. He had a small IT company. One of our first conversations involved how cosmic rays contribute to aging - not the usual level of conversation available at that particular pub. I wasn’t formally educated but I could tell he was impressed by the level of insight I brought. We formed a friendship initially. We’d seek each other out in the pubs and always have deep, thoughtful conversations - politics, life, space, physics, religion - all off the table, typically, in that environment - but never for us. He made an impression on me instantly.

I had lived there for a few years already so knew all the locals. He was new in town so I helped him recruit an IT intern from the people I knew. That didn’t work out. And, although I had no experience - he asked me to join his company as a programmer. I was enthused and accepted immediately - how could I not? My career was born in that moment. I threw my heart and soul into the work - I knew it wasn’t something I’d let slip. He proceeded to teach me all he knew, including how to be a man. And I listened. There was no ego on my part. He knew that.

He was my mentor at work, but more than that - he was the first man who saw the fire in me and named it. He opened the door to Nietzsche, to systems thinking, to a kind of masculine intellectual clarity I didn’t even know existed. Without him, I wouldn’t have become a CTO. I wouldn’t have written The Hedge. I wouldn’t have built the Synthesis framework or CFT.

More than just a career, Peter gave me permission to take myself seriously - to treat thought and ambition not as pretension, but as sacred obligations. He believed in me before I fully believed in myself. And that kind of belief, soul to soul, changes everything.

He died a few years ago. I was with his widow after he passed - not just in mourning, but in intimacy. That part is complicated. She was childless, still in her thirties, and full of longing. I think, in some strange way, she saw in me the last living thread of his fire. And perhaps I let myself be that for a while. I didn’t love her - not the way he did - but I cared. And I understood. There was grief between us, and reverence, and something unnameable.

She told me something that stayed with me. Peter once said to her that he saw in me the ambition he sometimes wished she had. That hurt. But it also affirmed something I’d always felt but never fully dared to claim: I was chosen. Not in a mystical sense, but in a very real, biological, cultural, human one. Chosen to carry the flame forward. To build where he left off.

After his death, I inherited most of his books - including every volume of Nietzsche he owned. They sit on my shelf now like relics. Not just because of what’s in them, but because of what they represent: transmission, legacy, fire passed from one soul to another.

In the years that followed, I stepped back from relationships. I needed space. I was still forming the ideas that would become Synthesis - a philosophical framework grounded in the axiom that Life is Good. But I noticed a pattern in the women I dated. Many of them were in their thirties, childless, thoughtful, ambitious - and quietly sad. Not tragic, but adrift. Like something had been postponed too long and now couldn’t be recovered.

I found myself saying the same thing to many of them: “Choose life.” The world would be a better place with more people like you - and like me - in it. They always agreed. None of them acted on it. None except a beautiful Italian friend I spent time with in Milan. She chose. And I’ll always be glad for her.

This isn’t a moral tale. It’s not about condemnation or purity. It’s about noticing the crossroads - the ones we all come to - and naming what gets chosen, and what doesn’t.

Peter knew how to choose. He didn’t flinch. He kept his blade sharp - in thought, in word, in life. No drift. No dithering. Just fire, aimed true. He called things as they were - sometimes with brutal precision, always with steel-eyed care. One of his lines still echoes in my mind, from the political trenches of 2017: “Every day May stays as Tory leader is doing damage it will take a year to fix. The brandy and revolver need to come out this weekend.” That was Peter: no nonsense, no flattery, no delusion. Just clarity, edge, and the will to act.

The world needs more of that now. Less drift. More dragons.

I write this as his heir - not in blood, but in fire. And I dedicate it to him.

May we all be lucky enough to be seen like that - and brave enough to carry what’s been entrusted to us.

– James Dean Conroy
Author of The Hedge.
Creator of Synthesis and CFT.
100% unapologetic dragon - just like Peter.