[vimeo http://vimeo.com/46824253 w=700&h=390] (by Francis Higgins, via The Poke)

His "pansexuality" stopped him getting into politics, he was punched by Norman Mailer, described Truman Capote's death as "a good career move" and he never quite hit the same literary orbit as some of his peers (Updike, Bellow, Roth et al), but Gore Vidal was a stunning essayist, a brilliant speaker and a glittering wit. The following comes from his obituary in The Guardian, but if you're interested, read the one in Time too:

For as long as democracy lasts, people will quote the most brilliant of his many epigrams – "Politics is just showbusiness for ugly people" – and, for as long as competitive endeavour exists, will parrot his cruel but psychologically astute observation that: "It is not enough to succeed; others must fail." It is rare for a week to pass without one or both of these remarks being quoted approvingly somewhere.

He was open to the charge of namedropping, but claims of famous acquaintance were never faked: he had been a friend and relative of the Kennedys and, when I went to interview Vidal at his breathtaking clifftop villa on the coast of the Amalfi coast, there were photographs of him with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, who were reputed to have taken refuge there during one of the presidential scandals. However, though distantly related to Clinton's vice-president, Al Gore, Vidal delighted in declining to meet a branch of the family he regarded as dull, grey sheep.

As often with Vidal, the remark about politics compensating the plain was double-edged. Famously attractive as a young man, he would have been a beautiful politician but, with the American electorate reluctant even now to back for most high offices candidates known to be gay, he was surely doomed to fail in the profession of his influential grandfather, Senator Gore of Oklahoma, who, being blind, relied on the newspapers being read to him by a group of assistants who included his grandson[...]But, even had he been straight, a mainstream political career would likely have been undermined by the savagery of his analysis of America. Politically, she was a corrupt and failing empire with a government that ruled through paranoid invocation of national security, he felt. However, he liked to reassure people that there was no risk of American culture dying – because it had never existed.

Despite the extremity of these opinions – and the fact that early novels such as The City and the Pillar (1948) and Myra Breckinridge (1968) were censored and banned because of their sexual content – Vidal later achieved mainstream bestseller and Book of the Month club status with a fictional sequence designed to correct what he saw as the deficient historical knowledge of his fellow Americans.

The Narratives of Empire books, from Burr (1973) to The Golden Age (2000), combined fact, gossip and waspish commentary in the most entertaining and subversive history lessons until the advent of David Starkey, whose style somewhat echoes Vidal's.

These popular works and lucratively paid but cheaply produced screenplays for projects including Bob Guccone's Caligula permitted Vidal to live in some splendour in Italy and California, while writing the essays on politics, literature and culture. They were premiered in periodicals and later preserved in book-form and had the feel of his true vocation. It was in one of these pieces that he characteristically claimed to have sneaked a gay sub-text into the screenplay of Charlton Heston's Ben-Hur.

A walking rejection of the claim that America has no class system, Vidal had the manner of an aristocrat. During the BBC coverage of the 2008 election, he spectacularly blanked David Dimbleby, whom he seemed to feel was pulling rank on him. Often, while interviewing Vidal, it struck me as a minor tragedy that no director had ever cast him as Lady Bracknell, for no actress has ever managed the levels of hauteur that this author could summon.

A few years ago, when I mentioned a passage in his memoirs that admits to being unable to express any open distress after the death of Howard Austen, his supportive partner for almost 50 years, he drawled: "Have you seen that film with Helen Mirren? The Queen? Our class are brought up not to show emotion."

This effortless identification with one of the highest-born figures in history was very Vidal: both in its social self-confidence and the fact that a question about emotional evasion was itself emotionally evaded through a provocative aphorism.

With a writer who was such a brilliant speaker and a natural entertainer, it is fitting that he has left a more durable record on film than most writers do: through occasional acting turns such as the arrogant senator in the political satire Bob Roberts. That part was a vision of another life he might have led. But anyone who relishes elegant and incisive writing and speech will be glad that Vidal was fated to explain, rather than practise, politics.

“The planet Venus, a circle of silver in a green sky, pierced the edge of the evening while the wintry woods darkened about me and in the stillness the regular sound of my footsteps striking the pavement was like a the rhythmic beating of a giant stone heart.” ― Gore Vidal, Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories

“Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.”

“Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.”

"Politics is just showbusiness for ugly people"

"You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: 'Where are the readers?'"

"A writer must always tell the truth, unless he is a journalist."

"The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so."

“I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.”

“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”

"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent."

“The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”

"Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."

“[Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.”

"At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care — if, that is, you're going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler."

"All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself."

"Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin."

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

(on Norman Mailer) "You know, he used the word 'existential' all the time, to the end of his life, and never even learned what it meant. I heard Iris Murdoch once at dinner explain to Norman what existential meant, philosophically. He was stunned."

“Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.”

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."

"There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices."

“Anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [John Lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]”

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

“In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.”

“I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.”

"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so."

"Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice like, Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin."

"Envy is the central fact of American life."

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

"In America, if you want a successful career in politics, there is one subject you must never mention, and that is politics. If you talk about standing tall, and it's morning in America, and you press the good-news buttons, you're fine. If you talk about budgets, tax reform, bigotry, and so on, you are in trouble. So if we aren't going to talk issues, what can we talk about? Well, the sex lives of the candidates, because that is about the most meaningless thing that you can talk about."

(on Ronald Reagan) "He is not clear about the difference between Medici and Gucci. He knows Nancy wears one of them."

"I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults."

"There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem."

"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."

"The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since."

"Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either."

"Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults."

"We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself."

"Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be."

"Never have children, only grandchildren."

"Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60"

“The unfed mind devours itself.”

"A good deed never goes unpunished."

“I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.”

"All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself."

"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."

"Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent."

"Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences."

"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return"

"Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."

“If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature.”

“Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!”

"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes."

"The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so."

"Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine."

"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic."

"As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days."

"Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself."

"Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die."

"There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices."

"There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

++

Your suggestions:

He described Reagan during the 1980s as “a triumph of the embalmer’s art”. – Clarence

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/40974947 w=700&h=350]

Five years. 25 countries. Shot entirely on 70mm film. Ron Fricke’s long-awaited “Samsara” looks incredible. Well worth having a sneak peek on the Samsara website. If you liked Baraka, you'll like this. If you didn't, chances are you won't.

The Buddhist view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.…To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-wracking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of passion, and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of his worldly existence. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.

-Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher (via)

[youtube=http://youtu.be/wE69jDKLvbs&w=700] “Part science, part nature and part digital art, Gillette created a series of projected light displays on buildings throughout Boston culminating in a massive water show. The event used half a dozen projectors to display video images of Ryan Lochte and Tyson Gay in action on two massive screens of particulate water vapor sprayed above the surface of the water adjacent to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.” — gillette

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/46296980 w=700&h=390] Olympic Vermin is such a great title for this video, featuring the scruffy creatures of London having their own mini-Olympic torch lighting. I have to say, I’d almost rather watch this then the real Olympics. Those rats are pretty cute (but you know, not in real life). Nice work from Amael Isnard and Leo Bridle.(via)

Be Glad Your Nose is on Your Face by Jack Prelutsky

Be glad your nose is on your face, not pasted on some other place, for if it were where it is not, you might dislike your nose a lot.

Imagine if your precious nose were sandwiched in between your toes, that clearly would not be a treat, for you'd be forced to smell your feet.

Your nose would be a source of dread were it attached atop your head, it soon would drive you to despair, forever tickled by your hair.

Within your ear, your nose would be an absolute catastrophe, for when you were obliged to sneeze, your brain would rattle from the breeze.

Your nose, instead, through thick and thin, remains between your eyes and chin, not pasted on some other place-- be glad your nose is on your face!

Walking around - Pablo Neruda It so happens I am sick of being a man.

And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs. The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool. The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens, no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails and my hair and my shadow. It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily, or kill a nun with a blow on the ear. It would be great to go through the streets with a green knife letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep, going on down, into the moist guts of the earth, taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don't want so much misery. I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb, alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses, half frozen, dying of grief.

That's why Monday, when it sees me coming with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline, and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel, and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses, into hospitals where the bones fly out the window, into shoeshops that smell like vinegar, and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines hanging over the doors of houses that I hate, and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot, there are mirrors that ought to have wept from shame and terror, there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting everything, I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops, and courtyards with washing hanging from the line: underwear, towels and shirts from which slow dirty tears are falling.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh-99_1k3mE&w=700]

In England once there lived a big And wonderfully clever pig. To everybody it was plain That Piggy had a massive brain. He worked out sums inside his head, There was no book he hadn't read. He knew what made an airplane fly, He knew how engines worked and why. He knew all this, but in the end One question drove him round the bend: He simply couldn't puzzle out What LIFE was really all about. What was the reason for his birth? Why was he placed upon this earth? His giant brain went round and round. Alas, no answer could be found. Till suddenly one wondrous night. All in a flash he saw the light. He jumped up like a ballet dancer And yelled, "By gum, I've got the answer!" "They want my bacon slice by slice "To sell at a tremendous price! "They want my tender juicy chops "To put in all the butcher's shops! "They want my pork to make a roast "And that's the part'll cost the most! "They want my sausages in strings! "They even want my chitterlings! "The butcher's shop! The carving knife! "That is the reason for my life!" Such thoughts as these are not designed To give a pig great piece of mind. Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland, A pail of pigswill in his hand, And piggy with a mighty roar, Bashes the farmer to the floor… Now comes the rather grizzly bit So let's not make too much of it, Except that you must understand That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland, He ate him up from head to toe, Chewing the pieces nice and slow. It took an hour to reach the feet, Because there was so much to eat, And when he finished, Pig, of course, Felt absolutely no remorse. Slowly he scratched his brainy head And with a little smile he said, "I had a fairly powerful hunch "That he might have me for his lunch. "And so, because I feared the worst, "I thought I'd better eat him first."

Roald Dahl

Checked in on The Atlantic for the first time in a while, and saw these gorgeous images. Lovely Sky Monsters is a series by Camille Seaman, who partnered with storm chasers to track down and photograph a magnificent cloud type - the supercell. Do definitely make time to look at the original set, and also her pictures of icebergs.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp1nrhJAX3I&w=700]

Brighton-born Arnhel de Serra started out doing portraits but then moved on to reportage. And this is my FAVOURITE sort of reportage. There's a wonderfully cheeky side to these observations, all centred around the great British show. [gallery]

(via) © Arnhel de Serra, 2012

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/44878206 w=700&h=390] "Join this lovable crew of droids as they solve their differences the only way dubstep robots know how."

Full screen. Headphones. Volume.

A 3d animated short set to music by Nostalgia. More info: fluxelmedia.com Nostalgia: facebook Full Length Track: soundcloud.com

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO2F48JKIlo&w=700]

This is an unofficial video. It's made with an excerpt of the animation 'Girl And Dolphin' by R. Zelma. The song is from the album 'The World Of Arthur Russell'. Love that cello!

"I'm a little lost Without you Or that could be an understatement Oh now I hope that I have paid the cost To let a day go on by and not Call on you"

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/45188800 w=700&h=390] ART+COM was commissioned to create an art installation for the Departure-Check-in hall of Terminal 1 at Singapore Airport while it was being refurbished. “Kinetic Rain” is composed of two parts, each consisting of 608 rain droplets made of lightweight aluminum covered with copper. Suspended from thin steel ropes above the two opposing escalators, each droplet is moved by a computer-controlled motor hidden in the hall's ceiling. The drops follow a 15-minute, computationally designed choreography where the two parts move together in unison, sometimes mirroring, sometimes complementing and sometimes responding to each other.

Below is the speech I made at Dad's celebration. It was a fantastic party - he'd have loved it. Barbecue and bluegrass, friends and family. Do please comment below - especially if you would like to share anything - it would be welcome. You can read his obituary by clicking here.

+

Hello everyone.

If my voice goes funny, please bear with me!

John Dyson. What a beautiful, beautiful man. This is at once the worst thing in the world, something I would never, could never want to do. But also something I can’t imagine not doing. It’s a real honour to have a chance to say a few things before you all. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night thinking “I must tell the nose trick story” or “don’t forget the Piewipe stuff”, but there’s just so much, I’m going to keep it simple. It would take more than a book to even begin to do him justice. I’ve typed out some notes (double spaced of course) because I really don’t want to forget a thing. Haven’t done a spell check, but that’s okay, you’ll survive.

I want to kick off by saying two things on behalf of us all, to you all: welcome, and thank you. Thank you for helping, those of you who have been able to lend your time.

Thank you for your thoughts, all. And also, to all of you, thank you for coming to celebrate with us, together. I can’t tell you how great it is. It’s been a very strange time, but there’s a certain amount of magic here. Dad would love all this.

So, what can I tell you about him that you don’t already know? I can tell you that he grew up with his parents and four sisters a little west of Auckland in a house called Cartwheels – an oasis of Dyson-ness, a private world, a palace of bush carpentry and other projects.

He was writing about it before he died. Talking about what it was like to get home and shout “hello” to the ducks, who’d quack the alert to the other animals: bull terriers called La Giaconda and Botticelli Cherub, grey doves called Confucius and Confusion, twin billy goats Marmaduke and Montmarcey, plus Hairy Breeks and Lady Godiva…not to mention Lonny Donegan the kitten or the seven donkeys, each named after a Dickens character.

He built his own bedroom in the house. Of course it was a ship’s cabin, with a raised bunk that had drawers under it and a board to stop you falling out in heavy seas.

It took him three years of mowing lawns on weekends to save up the money for his round-the-world ticket. At age just 16, a lanky teenager, he bought his ticket and set off to post-war Europe with a spring in his step. Incredible.

He fell in with a buddy, Martien, a Dutchman who was a few years older and about to get married. They were in Camaret near Brest in France when something happened that is just so…John Dyson. Walking around the harbour, he saw a rusty, beaten up old sardine boat for sale. Apple green, with white trimming, covered in grime and flakey paint.

Martien was joking when he suggested to Dad that they buy it, do it up and sail it to New Zealand. Dad, on the other hand, had fireworks going off in his head. You really could do it. Need to make a few adjustments of course, but yes. Why not? Probably only take a couple of years if you made stops along the way. What an adventure. Would it stand up to the big waves? When it gets scary, what matters isn’t so much your size as how well you can stand up to punishment.

On his way back the ocean liner he was on to Melbourne was hit by the most enormous freak wave, tipping the ship almost completely on its side, passengers sliding everywhere, injuring loads of people in the process – he said it was a bit like the Poseidon Adventure, crazy, people came ashore on stretchers. Dad though, was still thinking about his fishing boat. As he put it, “I was fascinated rather than fearful…even on the plane across the Tasman I continued drawing sketch plans of how a 30-foot hull could be divided into cabins and living accommodation for seven – my parents, my four sisters and I.”

That was him through and through though. Big dreams and a great imagination: Tall and indomitable. Resolute of purpose. A firm handshake, look 'em dead in the eye.

Age 19 he worked as a deck hand up through the Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea to the Caroline Islands and the Philippines. It took him to Hong Kong in 1963, where he and his room mate Gary Botting –both working for the South China Morning Post and living in Kowloon – planned on driving their Hondas westward around the world from Saigon. For some reason they had trouble obtaining visas…instead they enrolled as auxiliary policemen and firemen to get the “inside” story for the Post. He took the most unbelievable photos.

I can’t think of a single other person who by the age of 20 had done half of this, by the way.

When I was a kid I was always fascinated by a tiny tiny scar on his chin, which he called his mousehole – he’d always make up the most marvellous stories about how he got it. Usually by a chopstick-wielding opium smuggler on a Hong Kong junk…I always wondered if there was a grain of truth to them, it didn’t matter, as he told us growing up – if a story’s worth telling it’s worth exaggerating.

As a writer, though, he was honourable, ethical and thorough. Blessed with an amazing gift for winkling out adventures and characters. And he had a great fondness for them. He was always amazed by their exploits yet so humble about his own.

From there, he went to England. He said:

“It was there something happened that blue my blue-water ambitions out of the water. I was in Leeds covering a beauty contest for stable girls for the Daily Mail when a tall and good-looking girl working for the Yorkshire Post bumped into me on the steps and asked to share my umbrella. More than my umbrella, it turned out. Four great kids and all their smiles and bills, and their children; adventures all over the world; a big scruffy house with a dog, apple trees in the garden and a great view. When we were married, Kate and I made a deal: ‘I’ll come anywhere in a boat with you,’ she said. ‘Just don’t expect me to walk up a hill or sleep in a tent.’ By and large we stuck to it.”

He always travelled, especially if there was even a hint of anything to do with the sea. It didn’t matter if it was a trawler, an aircraft carrier or a rowing boat.

He went to the Antarctic more than once, he crossed the Atlantic in a replica of Christopher Columbus’s caravel La Niña, he sailed I think every ocean.

A story about the world’s deepest mine led to a story about a man who’d had his arm bitten off by a hippo, which led to another on a man who’d found a leopard in his kitchen and punched it on the nose…he absolutely adored Africa and its energy…he met the most amazing people wherever he went. And he kept in touch with them. Often helping them out after the story was published.

Child soldiers in Sierre Leone, gospel choirs in the mean streets of Soweto, local heroes around the world – the story arc was all; the triumph of human spirit over adversity.

He fought hard for the stories too. Had a great knack of picking an issue often several years before everyone else. I came across a letter to his old editor Dimi Panitza in which he put his case for a commission that was in danger of being squashed, signing off with:

"Anyway, I'm having tea with the High Commissioner of Tonga this afternoon, so I'll speak to you tomorrow."

What an amazing working life.

But he always came home. He always came home to the family and over Sunday roast dinner he’d tell us about these people and their extraordinary stories (it was either that or check us on our times tables). Sometimes – in the case of the hikers who were attacked and munched up by hungry grizzly bears – it was a bit much and I’d have to go and sick up a bit of roast potato before I could come back and finish the story.

He had a great way of sizing people up. He’d analyse them for their D.I.Q – desert island quota. The greatest compliment was for him to say – yep, if I was wrecked on an island, so-and-so would keep it together and be an asset. He admired pluck, curiosity and a can-do attitude more than anything else.

On holidays, we’d all be picking our noses and reading Tolkien or Jilly Cooper. He’d wander down to the nearest body of water, where he’d smoke his pipe and look at the boats. Rocking on his toes and jingling his change in his pocket, he’d wonder what this one or that one would be like to skipper. What sort of crew he’d need. Where he’d go. For him, sailing – and life – was all about spirit. The magic wasn’t about the sea or the journey so much as what you all share as a crew in getting there.

Of course it wasn’t all smooth sailing. One notebook from his trips on Sovrana has the short but intriguing footnote: “Naked wrestle with tree. Mud rescue.”

The mind boggles.

His favourite things were the simplest. Picking raspberries, drinking a rum and watching the sun set, looking at boats, having a quiet snooze. But all the time his mind would be firing away, dreaming up trips and adventures.

And with all of the places he’d been and the things he’d seen, he still somehow preserved the most amazingly pure way of seeing things. Naiveté isn’t the right word. Maybe innocence. He somehow managed to be a healthy skeptic without being a cynic. And he was effortlessly, hopelessly romantic. Even recently he sent me a link to a TV thing mum had done with the caption “I married a supermodel”.

Of course, as kids we gave him a good run around. He loved a good water fight. We’d all tease each other mercilessly. Him for his hilarious sneeze, or…well pretty much everything, especially his accent. Though we lived in fear of his tread on the stairs when we were supposed to be doing homework not watching Neighbours. Had getting out of that one down to a fine art – basically by watching telly standing next to the dishwasher so if he came in we could pretend we were doing our chores. A flash of those blue eyes and a steely set to his jaw was not a threat so much as a challenge we’d back down from.

Of course his authority was somewhat undermined when we caught him snoozing under his desk.

As we got older he just got better. He loved meeting our friends and hanging out with them. Finding out what made people tick.

Biggles, Hornblower, part of him was always an 11-year-old adventurer, imagining the enemy fleet over the horizon and how would we deal with it if it really came to it. The truth was, for all the ribbing we gave him, we always believed out of everyone he’d be the one to lope purposefully towards it and just get on with it, whatever the problem or crisis was.

This turned out to be true. The last few months…he handled with such elegance and grace. He seemed to get even more beautiful. His eyes deeper and brighter and more amazing.

He’d have loved this having you all here, but he didn’t want fuss. He said “I’m not going to say anything. You already know what I’d say. It’s all there in how we live our lives.” And it is.

So please, raise a glass. To Dad. To John Dyson. To the finest man I’ll ever know.   [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gX1EP6mG-E&w=700]

...Born To Split