The following speech was never said. It was written the old fashioned way, with pen and paper in advance of my dad’s funeral. The words must have come easy. They’re relatively few and little was crossed out. But on the day, in our village church, I couldn’t stand up there. His death had come as a shock, and as far as cancer comes, suddenly. He’d been officially diagnosed with pancreatic one day in July 2011, and less than 24hrs after, before I had opportunity to talk to him, he passed (a heart-attack hastening his end). There had been no goodbye. No grand father-son arguments undone. I was still reeling with emotion by the time of the funeral. What to think, and how to express it. At the time it was all I could do to write the words below.

I found the handwritten speech slotted into the pages of one of my old notebooks recently. Four years on, it seemed time to share it.

My dad told me that he never could write that easily. Here’s me trying not to be the same.

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“Thank you for coming today. Many of you in the audience I know – even if it is from when I stood a couple of foot younger – and others I don’t. It’s a privilege to see so many people whose lives were in someway shared with my father’s.

I was thinking about what I might want to say up here today, and it was a struggle. As you know his death came suddenly. But I wanted to say something, to mark the man that we can all remember.

Like any father and son our lives and our relationship was push and pull. 

As a boy my father ensured I had the obligatory interest in football. But while he was a Liverpool fan, I decided to supported Manchester United. 

I did work experience in my mid-teens at his company Siemens, as he showcased to me engineering. I now work in finance. 

And there there were the wine and bandy fueled political arguments – we never seemed to agree.

I could continue with a few more things, yet there is a flip side to all of this. He helped to give me a start in life, and there are so many things he left me with.

He took me to my first big concert to see U2. I now regularly raid his CD and vinyl collection. 

Thanks to him (and enforced sips at the age of 14) I have a taste for whisky, and regularly raid his spirit cabinet! 

As Mel has shown [in the prior speech] he had a drive to explore the globe and get to know local cultures. He endeavored to break away from the tourists spots when somewhere new. I’ve inherited this urge to travel. 

And then his ever present desire to provide for his family. I hope to follow that tradition.

There is one thought that I want to leave you all with. In one of the last conversations I had with him we talked about some of his memories. I suggested that he write it down. There are so many stories from his life – of characters, places, and comedy – worthy of repetition. Sadly, that’s not possible now. But each and every one of us here today, and friends from around the world that can’t be here in person, shared in some of these stories. We can do the remembering.

Thank you.”