Dear Grandpa,

I’ve written you many letters in my life – thank-you letters after birthdays and Christmases, and postcards smeary with sunscreen. It’s only now you are gone that I realise the thank-you letter I should have written is this one.

I wasn’t one of those lucky kids who could pop in to their grandparents’ place for tea after school. When I was little we lived a few hours’ drive away, at the opposite end of England. And for most of my adult life I’ve lived many hours’ flight away, at the opposite end of the planet.

But really, I have been very lucky, because somehow that distance has never mattered much. Even though we’ve only ever spent high days and holidays together, they were wonderful times. You were such a strong, warm, reassuring presence in my childhood – simply accepted, without question at the time, as a natural addition to a happy childhood home, yet shaping ideas of what’s important in life that I’ve carried through to adulthood.

And now you are gone, and we’re on opposite sides of I’m not sure what, separated by a distance that cannot even be measured. In a way, I’m writing this letter too late. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like it’s simply the writing of it that matters.

I have many treasured snippets of memory of times we shared when I was little – and some from when I was not so little. Family walks down the leafy lane behind your house. French cricket on the lawn in sunshine when you’d come to stay in the summer holidays. Sledding down your garden in the snow at Christmas. The piano stool pulled into the table for us all to squeeze in around. The smell of those loaves of bread you used to make.

Whether by nature or by nurture, was this where my own love of the outdoors, my interest in the natural world and in science – not to mention in baking – first arose? Was squeezing onto that little shelf behind the seats of your MG sports car to traverse those twisty Yorkshire lanes where my love of driving was sparked?

Mum says that ever since I’ve been old enough to travel on my own, I have made a habit of being somewhere far flung for my birthday. But wherever I was, I always had the birthday letter you’d slip into every card to us grandkids. Reading out your letter became my favourite birthday ritual, an essential part of the day – the familiar handwriting, the familiar patterns in your news. Tales of home.

But looking back, Grandpa, you are less about specific memories, and more about a feeling – of warmth, reassurance, safety, happiness. The epitome of what family should be.

As an adult, my abiding memory will be a feeling too – the feeling of your wonderful handshake. A great firm grip, a beaming smile and the glint of your gold fillings as you’d vigorously pump my hand up and down. That handshake conveyed more clearly than any man-hug just how delighted you were to see me. And the feeling was mutual.

– James Mitchell Crow