RIP

This church has been a familiar feature of Craigmillar all the time I've lived in Edinburgh. At first it was surrounded by a very deprived area of shabby tenements, then it was alone in a wasteland of cleared ground, and now it's almost surrounded by new flats and trees.

I don't think I've walked past it until today, when I had to collect my Dad's death certificate from the nearby surgery. I got the call from the nursing home at 07:20 today to say that he'd died ten minutes earlier. We'd known that it was coming over the years, months and weeks of his decline due to Alzheimer's and dementia, and the father I knew left me years ago. But on Monday we heard that he'd lost the swallowing reflex, so the end was near. Hence this morning's news was no shock.

A quiet but wonderfully practical Yorkshireman, he gave to the world as a pharmaceutical biochemist - overseeing the first production batch of the groundbreaking asthma drug Intal would have been a claim to fame for a less modest man - and in designing prefabricated toilets and signal boxes for the Ffestiniog railway. I've great memories of family holidays erecting and fitting these, when tearing around the Tan-y-Bwlch nature trail brought me my first taste of off-road running.