Nearly two months.. We said goodbye on an impossibly beautiful warm day.

Your last rose is with the rest that I have collected over the years.

Days seem less bright and less full of silly bits of trivia, smiles and daftness

I miss you Cariad every single day.

Many years ago when I was in Rochdale and struggling to get Drs to take me serious Pol turned up and told me he believed me that there was something wrong. He booked me in a Nuffield hospital for tests and I got the first of many diagnoses. 

The gift he gave me was that he believed me. Truly believed me and helped me without expecting anything in return.

He was also present during a cardiac event and made me take it serious. He ignored my protest of “I’ll be fine in a minute” and gave me a look that made me realise I should get checked out. It led to the diagnosis of a genetic cardiac condition. 

Pol cared, it was the very centre of who he was.

He will be deeply missed

Big bro... 46 years is not long enough. Although we didn't always see eye to eye the last 5 or 6 years we have reached a mutual understanding and respect.

Gone but truly never forgotten.

He was a good friend, who I'd not seen for some time, but when we met up again at Gaz' funeral it felt like nothing had changed. He was deeply practical, intensely loving, and a thoroughly NICE chap.

Damnit. :/

He was a BOFH after my own heart, and one of the few people I knew who could deploy sarcasm around ISP operations and associated areas of tech in a way that was mutually appreciated and ... I'm going to miss him.

Paul was my older cousin. I can't claim to have known him very well but he's always been kind and generous to me and I only have good memories of him. One of the earliest conversations I remember having in my life was with him in our grandparents kitchen.
I particularly remember a trip to London as a teenager with my parents, his Auntie Fiona (Fi) and Uncle Sandy, and my brother Graeme where Paul came and spent a day with us visiting a museum and sightseeing.
It's hard to believe i won't see him again.

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.

He often started his conversations with "Here's one for you...", followed by some interesting or witty observation... well Paul, here's one for you.

I met Paul at Nildram, he took me under his wing and help teach me Solaris and Linux, was a companion on many lunch breaks (and often insisted on paying) and gave me a place to stay when I needed it. He was an uncommonly kind and generous man. I was lucky enough to go on a couple of trips to Scotland with him and get a tour with an expert. I regret we drifted apart and never rekindled our friendship.

When I think of Pol, I always remember his kindness, his lovely voice, his smile and humour, and his ability to make you feel that what you were saying was the most important thing in the world to listen to right then. The world's a dimmer place without him.

Pol, it's still very hard to believe you're gone. It was a privilege to attend your wedding, a privilege to have met you at all, and while despite our long acquaintance I can't claim to have known you very well or deeply, I will miss your Scottish brogue, your fierce practicality, and the obvious love and care you gave to people who are also dear to me. This was not the way it was meant to be.

We met when he was offering a lift and crash space, and he was very patient with an afper's anxiety attacks and a very long drive through really thick fog. I want to emphasise here how long the drive was, because it was long. He told terrible jokes in a lovely voice and let me crash over, and we talked and talked for a day, then two longer than I meant to stay.

Then I went home and the next time we chatted online, I asked him to go out with me.

He spent a rather large chunk of his life driving somewhere and then Doing All The Things and he would not have wanted anything else. He loved so many people and we never stopped loving each other.

Sorely missed.

When I think of Pol I always seem to think of him driving, long, long drives that went on for miles because he was always happy to take the scenic route so he could point out places he thought I'd find interesting. He had a real talent for making the longest journey fly past so quickly as it was inevitably filled with talking and laughing. I'll always remember that voice and that laugh.