In 1975 my mother a Pan Am flight attendant layed over every few weeks at a London hotel. One trip she had bought a rug which instead of being delivered bricked so she could put in the belly back to San Francisco it arrived as a roll an hour before she was leaving. A maintenance man called John at the hotel packaged it up for her – 35 years later John lay in St Margarets Hospice Somerset fighting a brain tumor which took hold of him in January this year. John along with his wife Gerda (a German who had lived through WWII in Berlin) became our ‘grandparents’. At every major stage of my life there was John dressed as a proper English gentleman with his collar and cravet bounding around with endless energy and putting his practical talents to work. He was at our cottage in England when we came as toddlers for summer holidays, at my university graduation and the start of many races always coming bearing bags of sweets and ready to tickle me even at the age of 30 to make me smile. John wasn’t just there for our family he became everyone’s Uncle John building a tree house with the neighbors kids with roofing tiles some ass**** even turned them into planning permission! He also spent a large proportion of his pension in the last 8 years personally paying for and packaging up over 5000 parcels which he sent to British troops in Afganastan. The lucky soldier would arrive back at base to find a 2kg shoe box filled to the brim with little treats – socks, razor blades, chocolate etc and better than that a hand written letter from John someone they had never met.

On 6th June we started the Round Britain Race, on our qualifying cruise to the start we received a tearful call from my mother saying John had gone to the Hospice. We had visited him a week before and told him we wanted him to make sure he was at the start of this race as he was when I did it in 1998. Having a hard time talking he signaled he would see it on the computer screen as he was at the point of finding it hard to walk. At midday the start gun went in Plymouth and at 1pm he succumbed to the horrible tumor which felled a unique vicarous, generous man. We set up a Just Giving page before the start at http://justgiving.co.uk/TeamPerrin . To sponsor us as we race Around Britain and Ireland raising money for the Hospice.