The comforts of constancy

Every Wednesday for most of my life, our father has sat down to compose a weekly letter. News from home. It was never portentous; mostly stories of the wild birds at the feeder, antics of cats, all the great meals our mother cooked and her visits to Pilates.

He recorded every lecture he attended, meetings with old friends and all the classical music concerts. The gentle domestic life flowed and these letters found their way to my sister when she was in Melbourne, my brother in Bowral. One came each week tucked in a corner of the Australian diplomatic bag to Moscow and then regularly to London and now France.

At first written with his trusty fountain pen and more recently by email when he became a silver surfer. The Wednesday letter was our constant.

And for the first time in forty years the gentle wit and sometimes wry news from home will not be there. Dad died last Friday; just after going to the post office to buy stamps for a batch of letters. It is too soon and too raw for that to feel appropriate an end for a man who was such a diligent writer. We will miss him terribly.

Archibald Niven Sinclair 1926-2016.