It was Christmas Day 1984. Mum had taken the turkey out of the oven, the table was set for twelve people, paper crowns were on our heads... and Dad was nowhere to be found. We went down the lane in our slippers and found him squeezed behind poor eighty-year-o...

My second week at the workshop I was terrified of him. Not because he was harsh — quite the opposite, his quietness felt massive. I was working on an 1820s English fusee bracket clock, slipped with my tweezers, and snapped a mainspring with a sound like a pist...

For my tenth birthday I asked him for a Game Boy. I was a silly kid, completely obsessed with screens. On my birthday he handed me an old shoebox wrapped in brown parcel paper and butcher's twine. Inside was a complete 32-piece chess set he'd whittled by hand...

The night before we married at St. Jude's in Oxford, the old church organist took ill and there was no one to play the wedding march. I was in tears in my room. Robert showed up at my window at midnight on a borrowed bicycle with a portable cassette player he'...