One of the ways you can tell how much of an impact our dad made in his life is by the number of people that we’ve had to call in the days following his passing.  As the condolences came in, the descriptions of his character were all loving comments about what a fun, happy, kind and giving man he was.

He was a natural-born teacher; he loved his job and it made him a great storyteller. 

He was a fixer. No household project too big or too small - Mum would give him a task and he would be able to get it done.

He was always there. He was basically a taxi service for Sera and I for our school years. He’d be there in front of the TV waiting for us to get home at night, and there in the morning the next day to drive us to our Saturday jobs. 

He considered himself our local neighbourhood Dr Doolittle - one week he’d be nursing a sick hedgehog back to health, the next he’d be trying to teach a pigeon how to fly. If he had his way, our house would have been a small zoo.

In his last decade, he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, a disease that slowly robbed his true personality. But even in the darker days he still tried to see the light. If you played a song he liked, he’d remember all the words and sing along.

He participated in clinical trials to help find a cure for Alzheimer’s, so in his memory we have set up this page to help raise money for Alzheimer’s Research UK.  Alzheimer’s Research UK fund groundbreaking research into dementia so that one day, families won’t have to watch their loved ones fade away.