Dad was born in Johannesburg in 1932. His father Harry worked for the railways, He never got promoted because he refused to learn Afrikaans. he was 51. Dad’s mother, Edith, was a nurse. She was 45. She was born in 1887.

He was an only child of Victorian parents.

I remember when South African granny came to visit us in Dublin in 1970, she was still quite Victorian. We upgraded our rental TV to a colour one in her honour, but it didn’t make her any less frightening.

He did well in school, and left St Andrews, Grahamstown aged only 15, to study engineering at Witwatersrand University.  He played rugby for The Transvaal, or was it The Orange Free State? And in his holidays, he first cycled, and then motorcycled, around his country of birth.

Meanwhile, The Population Registration Act, 1950 classified all South Africans into one of four racial groups: "Black", "White", "Coloured", and "Indian". Something wasn’t right.

When he won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1953, he wanted to escape South African politics and be an aeronautical engineer. But when he got to Brasenose College Oxford, he was told there was “no such thing, old boy”. So, he studied politics, philosophy and economics instead. His philosophy tutor was the writer, Iris Murdoch. That’s where he discovered logic. Apartheid wasn’t just inhumane, it was illogical.

When he married Bridget and was welcomed royally to Yorkshire, he surrendered his South African Passport and became an Englishman. He still couldn’t row for toffee or smoke cigars, and he didn’t know which way to pass the port.

When Dad finished at Oxford he got a job with The British Oxygen Company. He used his engineering logic for them in South Africa, in Nigeria, In Sheffield, in Rotherham and in London. “You have to go to where the work is,” he used to say.

When he was put in charge of selling welding equipment, he learnt to weld. I still have the anvil which he made by slicing up a piece of steel railway track. When he ran the refrigeration division, he learnt how crisps changed from being a seasonal product to an all-year-round bar snack. It’s to do with sugar/starch conversion, apparently. He was quite rude about Tayto cheese and onion flavour, but we won’t mention the two different Tayto companies, yet.

In 1970 The British Oxygen Company decided that the best person so sort out their ‘Irish problem’ was someone who wasn’t English, but South African. We loved Ireland, lots of friends, playing pirates on Dalkey Island, climbing the Sugar Loaf, holidays in Donegal and Connemara, messing around in boats, Mum even loved Ireland, she took up golf and got a dog, the first of many dachshunds. Meanwhile, Dad was discovering that there are 2 Irelands. He bounced back and forth between Dublin, where they hated him because he was English and Belfast where they suspected him of being too Irish. It wasn’t logical.

Dad liked logic. He wanted everything to be neat and tidy. He liked a job well done.

He built a new double garage next to our house in Beaconsfield in 1968, he laid all the bricks with his own hands, Flemish bond. The original garage was turned into a playroom where he set up his amazing Hornby double “o” scale model railway.

He built a Mirror dinghy from a kit in 1970. He double taped the joints and reinforced the corners. It was very strong. It was finest of the hundreds of mirror dinghies that were always getting in the way of the Mail Boat in Dun Laoghaire harbour. It was also quite heavy. Andrew said it slowed him down in regattas, but, really, the thing that was slowing him down was his crew. Me.

Dad liked having the right tool for the job, he had many, many tools: Drills, saws, hammers, mallets, vices, pliers, bolt cutters, secateurs, screwdrivers, plenty of each, and plenty of screws, nails, washers, nuts & bolts. All neatly stored in boxes like this: Gallaher’s Rich Dark Honeydew. One and a half inch Panel Pins, Heavy. There are still hundreds of these tins in his shed in Thames Ditton.

He once made a box to put on the roof rack of our car, a brown Ford Cortina Ghia estate. He made it to transport camping equipment and then transform into kitchen shelving at the Campsite. He double taped the joints and reinforced the corners. It was very strong. It was also quite heavy. Once it was on the roof of the brown Ford Cortina it was so heavy that we couldn’t actually put anything in it. But it was a very useful shelf.

Over-engineered was one of his favourite phrases.

He was very good at bridge and taught us all to play. Andrew got quite good, but I was so scared of playing the ‘wrong’ card that I was happiest when I was ‘the dummy’ and not playing any cards at all. But I did beat him at Rummikub a few times.

In 1978 he “went to where the work was” again, this time it was Singapore. Mum was beginning to doubt his theory. He enjoyed water skiing, windsurfing and marathon running. Again, Mum wasn’t so sure. But she liked a bit of Rattan and The Warren Golf Club, which only had 10 holes (all you need when it’s 30° and 99% humidity). They both loved dragon jars, the huge decorative pots that the Chinese migrants to Singapore had legendarily brought with them full of rice. Perhaps they identified with that nomadic life.

Surprise, surprise things got a bit illogical in Singapore. The company house that my parents lived in was worth more than the company itself. Something had to give. So, in 1985 they came back to London with their dragon jars to live in the little terraced house in Fulham that Andrew had lived in while studying at Imperial College.

By coincidence, I had just graduated, with a 3rd in Law, from Durham. We all moved in together. There was shouting. There was playing The Jesus and Mary Chain very, very loud. There was door slamming. I moved out. Then Mum moved out.

Then I moved back in. Dad and I rubbed along quite nicely for a few months before I bought my flat in Bethnal Green. We went to AA meetings in Chelsea with actors and rock stars, obviously I can’t tell you which ones. Dad was finding that a sober world was just as illogical as anything that had gone before, but he threw himself into service, made tea, chaired meetings, mentored others and sat on committees. It made him think again.

Mum also thought again, and they moved to Thames Ditton and started to have fun. They went on holidays around the world, instead of work placements. Mum was captain of the golf club. Dad discovered that giving up golf, was more relaxing than trying to play it. He played bridge with men who were mainly called Michael, Mum played bridge with her girlfriends and glass of wine. He became expert at gardening. He started a gardening club, that is still going strong. He never did anything by halves. He liked his curry hot, his steak rare and his biltong dry and hard. He knew the old South African Anthem by heart, and the new one too.

I never remember him liking ice cream when I was young, but Willow assures me that: “The best thing about Grandpa is that he always had ice cream and custard with his pudding “. Perhaps, he had ‘thought again’ about ice-cream. When I moved in with him in 2020, during the second covid lockdown, ice cream was always at the top of our shopping list. For someone so logical, the way Alzheimer’s robbed him of his memory, was particularly cruel. Dad was still thinking again when he died, sitting in his chair, with his dachshund Georgie on his knee, chatting and having coffee with Ruby. Thinking again.