Extraordinarily Lucky

Last autumn, my son Pierre asked me what his grandfather had done for a living. I said that he had been a journalist and a businessman. Obviously, Pierre’s next question was to ask what line of business Nicholas had been in.

If you read the recent articles in the Irish papers by Sue Leonard here today ...and others... about his zigzag career on both sides of the Irish Sea,.... you will understand why I have always found it quite difficult to answer this question.

So…I showed Pierre the timeline document that Nicholas had written a few years ago about his life, recalling the highlights of each year. As we read through it together, I remembered what an amazing life he has lived, both personally and professionally. Pierre found it inspiring to read about his grandfather’s boundless energy and undaunted entrepreneurial spirit across such a wide range of interests and with so many people across the years.

After we had read his timeline...I emailed Nicholas to tell him how much Pierre and I had enjoyed reading it. I asked if 1964 was his favourite year... it was by far the longest entry, taking up a whole page. It was that year, some time after he had left Oxford, that he had not only met Kirsty again by chance and soon after married her...but he had also created Business and Finance, a brand new magazine in Ireland.... and appeared on Irish TV for the first time. He replied that it had certainly been the busiest - and that across all the years, he had been …“extraordinarily lucky”.

Today we are mainly remembering Nicholas as we knew him in the family. We have put some articles about his work and life on our remembrance webpage at muchloved.com. Thank you so much to everyone for the kind messages that you have posted there, the lovely cards that you have sent us and the donations that you have made to the arthritis research charity.

Nicholas would tell great anecdotes about his life, and he would often end each one by saying that it would make a good chapter in his autobiography. A modest man, he never wrote an autobiography...but his anecdotes live on through us.

Friends and family have written to us with lovely memories about the stories he told. They said it was inspiring to hear his wit and humour, how he darted in and out of conversations, picking up threads of discussion and making us all laugh. They remember his warmth and the fantastic twinkle in his eye when he cracked a joke. Every gathering was better for his presence.
We all have own stories about Nicholas’ idiosyncratic approach to life. I remember the huge piles of weekend newspapers, which he devoured at lightning speed, even whilst waiting patiently in the car for me to find my way back from an orienteering course. I took for granted the personalised newspaper clipping service...often delivered in a brown paper envelope... (recycled of course!)... stuffed full to the brim with roughly torn off strips of newspaper.

I will also miss the mass of jiffy bags strewn beneath his desk which made up his complex filing system....his absolutely incredible and completely accurate memory for every single phone number in the phone book... and his knowledge of family history... ancient, modern and current....as well as the mysterious knots in his pocket hankerchief for remembering things... we have never understood how that system worked.

Nicholas enjoyed making speeches, which were cleverly put together...and where his sincerity shone through. I am sure many of our extensive Irish family remember the powerful speech that he made at his own mother’s wake in Dublin. We particularly remember the beautiful speeches he gave at our weddings and at Kirsty’s 70th birthday party to all their Linlithgow friends. We know that they valued his work for the local community...where he did a great job of promoting the Arts Guild... and chairing the successful campaign against an out of town hypermarket in Linlithgow. 

We were all so impressed when, at the age of 78, he started a new line of work...this time creating cartoons. For him, cartoons were more than a quick chuckle. In 2017, he wrote:

“The best cartoons do more than simply make people laugh; they help people cope with the demands of being a human being.”

I think you will agree that Nicholas helped each of us cope with being a human being in many different ways. This is not to say that....like all of us...he had his own difficulties. But I am sure he would be the first to point out that Kirsty, who he adored, was the person that helped him to make the most of his life and be happy.

For myself, I feel... extraordinarily lucky... to have had a father who always radiated unconditional love. Pascal, Eloise, Pierre and I also feel so fortunate to have had Nicholas here close to us in Scotland as the children were growing up.

Nicholas wrote many little poems for his grandchildren before they had learnt to talk. I would like to end with a quote from the poem he wrote for baby Sam in 2006:

Ten weeks and five days since the day of my birth,
They were right when they told me time flies here on earth.