CELEBRATING NICK

My eldest son Nicholas (Nick) died when he was 35 years old. Today would have been his 47^th birthday. Our whole family miss him terribly, but today we celebrate the memories of who he was and what he achieved. The photographs trace his academic progress. When he came back from his first day at school and was asked how it was, he replied with a sigh that they had spent all day doing ‘the cat sat on the bloody mat!’.  He would go on to score straight As in all his school subjects, then a First in Chemistry at the University of East Anglia, and  a Ph.D there under the supervision of Professor John Sodeau. Nick went with John to the University of Cork in Ireland to help with the setting up of a new Centre for Research into Atmospheric Chemistry. They still list his contributions to four articles in the Journal of Physical Chemistry. Later Nick would leave academic life and work as a management consultant at Accenture in London.

But Nick carried all this success modestly and with an easy grace. A kindly and sensitive person, with a quick sense of humour, he made friends wherever he went, including during a year at the University of Texas at Austin. Taking an optional course there in swimming, he found himself in with the American  training squad for the Olympics. They took him under their wing and when he did his compulsory test times, they ran up and down the poolside shouting out his times, and urging him on: he just squeezed inside the set minimum.

Nick always encouraged me to write about my rake’s progress from a farm labourer’s cottage, and was inspired by it to paint the ‘upward path’ that is the basis for the cover design. It’s a particular sadness for me that he is not able to read this memoir and see the contribution he made to it. But I recall too, at my70^th birthday party, where he gave me this painting as a gift, how he and brother Ben vied with each other to tell the funniest stories about me. I think it was probably a dead heat.

So we all miss Nick very much, as a son, a brother, an uncle,  a cousin, a nephew, and a friend. Peace Nick; and thanks for the cover story.