Pol seemed to know everything, and if he didn't, well, give him a few minutes with google and then he did. When he left one company, they had to replace him with 16 people just to cover *most* of what he knew. It wasn't just tech stuff either, he knew quite a bit about the law (much to the alarm of some contract lawyers who weren't as good as they thought they were) and almost got a law degree from the OU, but the combination of work and study was too much at that time. It was always very hard to get Pol to really rest, he always had to be doing *something*.
While many people jealously guard their knowledge, he loved to share, though sometimes that was not as appreciated as it might have been, especially when he knew more about someone's specialist area than they did. It was him that pointed out to quite a senior neurologist that the changes he wanted to make to a friend's medications were contraindicated with other things she was taking and might have killed her.
When he did his IAM, one of their observers tried to tell him he shouldn't do a particular thing and got a lecture on how that particular car didn't work how they thought it did and so what they were advising him to do instead wouldn't work and would make the car very unhappy.
Pol categorically *wasn't* a mansplainer, though - he respected other people's knowledge and would only correct them when he was sure they were wrong.
He could fix just about anything. Cars, bikes, hardware, software, electrics, that's obvious, but he was also brilliant at knowing just how to turn someone's mood around. Tears could easily turn into helpless giggling around Pol.
He also tinkered with and upgraded things constantly. I recently came back from a trip to find that the house had sprouted smart lights and heating. At one point, there were something like 24 Rover 75s with heated windscreens - the owners' club had a batch made and one broke - and we had two of them. When one of my work colleagues was trying to boast about all the toys on his expensive new car, he was most put out to discover that my old 75 had all the same things *and* some his didn't.
The long-distance driving has been mentioned, but perhaps the extremes of it need to be stressed: I believe he once drove to the netherlands to take someone out for a meal. When I had an ear infection or something of the like that made me feel motion sick if I was still, he bundled me into the car and drove me to the lake district and then on to his parents and back again. Once, a desire to go to the seaside was expressed, and we ended up in Ayr.
When I was down he would often take me out for a drive around our local area during which he would talk about military vehicles, planes, things that had happened at various jobs, or whatever he'd been reading on wikipedia or watching on youtube that week and by the time we got back, I'd be feeling a lot better. His store of things to talk about seemed nearly endless, but there were some old favourites that I was always happy to listen to again. Absolutely anything was fascinating when Pol was talking about it, and he was always able to make complicated things seem simple.
As the mug on the pictures page says, In Case Of Emergency, Ask Paul. Any task you weren't sure how to tackle, any dilemma you had, any seemingly-insurmountable problem, Pol would be able to figure it out. So many times this last couple of days I've wished I could ask for his help or opinion.
The one thing he was bad at was putting himself first. He hated being tired or ill or letting people know when they were annoying him in social situations if he didn't think they intended to. Even if they straight-up told him to tell them to go away if he wanted to, he'd rather just avoid being near them so it never came up, even if that meant he missed out on things he would otherwise have enjoyed. I've seen him assure someone who I could see was making him uncomfortable that he was perfectly happy to keep talking. Like many of us, he was very quickly 'peopled out' if cornered by the wrong people or at the wrong time, but was very social with the right ones at the right time.
He could become the centre of your world without you even realising, because he was always giving, not taking. He would share everything he had and everything he was, and not only did he never demand anything in return, it could be hard to get him to accept anything. He could make it feel like you were doing *him* a favour taking from him. Especially if you were lucky enough to be eating a second helping of his mac cheese, which was without equal.
Pol did a lot of amazing things, but the most special of all of them was just Being Pol.