My Dad was born on 2nd September 1936, and died on 2nd May 2020. The hardest thing, writing about another person’s life, is that we only ever see a fraction, we’re only there for a bit of it. But the bit I remember most vividly is living in Jordanstown, Northern Ireland, and Dad would go running every morning, for an hour round Belfast Lough, and would regularly return with an injured seabird, its wings covered in oil, or some other injury. There was a herring gull called Spiky, a cormorant called Sponge. And we would have to feed and look after these poorly, abandoned birds, wash them clean in the bath, before they could be returned safely to the Lough. He also collected useful bits of driftwood, and, eventually, using timber he had foraged, and some he had bought, he built a yacht – his own boat, constructed from scratch, complete with mast, sails, tiller, everything – long before you could find out how to do these things on the internet. But I don’t think it ever occurred to Dad that he had limits, that it might be an idea to stop and rest. He lived enough life for a dozen people, 84 remarkable years. How lucky we were to have shared so many of them. Thanks, Dad.