I would like to thank Shaun for asking me to speak today; to do so is a very profound honour -- not only because it gives me the chance to describe what David Llewellyn meant to me, as a friend, but also because I suspect that all of us here came to know something very similar in David, something quite awe inspiring about him, and yet also so very human. And to be given this opportunity, this responsibility -- to name this thing, to name this David that we all knew and loved -- is an honour. A privilege.

I have to confess that the prospect of speaking about David, of his death, and of his life, terrifies me. I have not known many people as deeply educated, and with as real an appreciation of the history of art, of literature, of culture, of politics, of so many things, as David. When I first contemplated speaking in remembrance of David (on such an occasion as this, and in as dignified and hallowed a setting as this, in the company of what I knew would be many people who loved to learn, and in the company of many who have had their own knowledge and learning truly enriched by David’s mind and wit), when I imagined all of this, I wondered how I could possibly do the man justice, how I could possibly hope to cover anything but the tiniest sliver of the influence he had most certainly on all of us. My mind immediately raced over all of the possible ways I might try to capture and represent all of the teaching David had provided. I imagined all of the passages in literature and philosophy that David would have reliably committed to memory which could so completely explain, in the words of our greatest sages and bards, what death truly is. I imagined all of the various depictions on canvas, in frescoes, or sculpted into marble, that David would have been readily able to tell us about, in his completely genuine and uncondescending manner, which would help us to understand the fullest visions of bereavement offered by the world’s greatest masters. I imagined all of the swelling or subtle strains of music – classical or contemporary – that David could have described, whose subject was loss, or mourning, or death itself, with little tidbits of biographical information about the composers in question, or perhaps some curious historical notes about each piece’s performance history. I imagined taking the best of these, and laying them before you as an homage to a friend who was, for me, like a never ending and thoroughly wonderful class: a perpetual seminar, an enduring trip to an infinite library, overseen by a trusted guide, whose open love of life, and genuine good humour made every lesson feel more like a cruise or a holiday, than a museum or gallery.

But then I realized that I was imagining something that was impossible. I was trying to envision delivering a eulogy about David’s expansive erudition, while depending on him, on David, to sketch in all the necessary, and most significant points (which was ridiculous, of course, though entirely revealing of what he was for me, and I suspect for so many of us). There was no way I could ever hope to mimic or match such a thing as David’s intellect, or even his simple interest, and joy, in the record of what our culture has thought and recorded. Indeed, I wasn’t even imagining delivering a eulogy which needed David; I was imagining David delivering his own eulogy, or a treatise on the history of death in art, or on the history of eulogies in all their artistic forms, with me as a greedy audience, thankful he was doing the job for me.

So what am I to say, now? ...now that it is obvious that I was dependent on him... that we owe David, even now, today, outrageously, at his own funeral? Am I to say “Thank you”? Is that sufficient? I can hear him chuckling, now, like some benevolent uncle, and providing a citation that would capture this irony.

The truth is, I don’t dare to offer some pithy reference or allusion -- out of respect for David, and in open recognition that, in my relationship with him, he was the master, and I the student. I also will not offer any quotation, or extract, for I know that not to do so will keep us searching for the echo of David’s voice in the art and literature that we have yet to encounter, or that we will experience again, and that this would make him happy: to know that we still want to learn, and read, and see, and listen, and discover. And I will look for this echo of David in the learning that I have yet to do, and I promise his spirit that I will not fail to remember the greatest lesson that he gave -- that I will delight in the best, and funniest, and deepest, and most sincere, the most human, most troubled, and most ecstatic expressions of the human soul and heart. For I believe this is what David Llewellyn has taught us to do, and I think we owe it to him, to hear him, and to know him again, continuously, in this fashion.

But I also want to remember David in detail, in the past, in the concrete. So instead of a passage, or an allusion, I will tell a story: an anecdote of how David helped me. I have many such stories, but this one will have to suffice, and I trust you all will see in it what David was for you.

I have often had, through the years, the fortune to share a preparation period with David at Central Technical School. Sometimes, this was an infuriating prospect, as I would try to accomplish some hurried piece of busy-ness at one computer terminal, frantic, while David would sit beside me at another, whistling along to some unconscionably loud piece of jazz or classical music playing on his computer, entirely at ease, perhaps maintaining or editing his own personal variorum edition of some Shakespearean quarto (and yes, David did actually do such things, and what’s more, even introduce such work here and there to classes at Central Tech), or perhaps he might be amending one of his meticulously constructed “study guides” for a core text in one of his classes. Either way, slowly, but surely, David would inevitably drag me into his world, from mine, and before I knew it, the learning would begin, even if at first I was secretly petulant and resisting. As we all know, David measured time in centuries, or even millennia (except when it came to his own meals, and other physiological needs). He lived in a world of long epochs and eras, and he had very little patience for any endeavour whose philosophical underpinnings had roots measurable in mere years, or simple decades. And alas, many of the busiest, and most frantic tasks we undertake in the education business have just these sorts of shallow historical roots. So he never felt bad about distracting me, as it was always for a noble purpose.

But to the point. I am not sure how David brought me there, but we did end up talking about music, and film, as I recall. Perhaps what he was listening to reminded me of something; I don’t know. I mentioned a film which contained in its score a classical piece that I deeply enjoyed, but whose title and composer I did not know. When I tried more or less unsuccessfully to hum it, and then mentioned the film, David of course knew it, and told me, “That’s Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.” He then told me it was a modern piece: twentieth century, in fact. He gave me a little detail about Barber’s life, described the Adagio as a kind of “neo-Baroque”, and then sensing, I think, that I needed some help understanding the original, “old” Baroque, filled me in there as well. At no point in all of this was David either condescending or pontifical. Indeed, it was his own genuine passion for what he was discussing that completely had me forget myself, and my pride, as all that he offered sank in. I knew David had an astonishingly extensive library of compact discs, and I asked him if he had a copy of Barber’s Adagio. He brought me a CD the next day, with Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, of which the Adagio, I then discovered, was merely a part.

But that’s not the end of the story. A couple of days later he asked if I was done with his CD. I assumed he was impatient for its return, and bumbled through a promise for its speedy delivery, as David was not afraid to snap at me when I (or the world generally) tested his patience (I had indeed grown accustomed to this impatience, especially when David struggled with uncooperative computers in the office). But I was wrong. He actually had more CDs for me: the original Baroque, the stuff I was most embarrassed not to know: Arcangelo Corelli, some Albinoni too, and others. He made no comment at this point, offered no lecture, no study guide -- just the stack of CDs. We in fact had another discussion, much later, in which I mentioned something I’d heard on the radio, a piece by Henry Purcell, an English composer. David told me then that Purcell was an example of English Baroque, and I quietly nodded my head, as to thank him at such a time would have been an insult to David’s true and humble dignity, and would have embarrassed him.

I think that the lesson about Samuel Barber may have been as much as four, or five years ago. I have been waiting all this time, waiting to show the world how David helped to make me more of an educated person, a person less afraid, a person more confident around those with more knowledge than me about… the Baroque. To show that I, too, now know a little something about… the Baroque! If only a little something.

And now I have had that chance. And more, much more: now I believe that if one of my students asked me, “Sir, what’s Baroque?”, I think I could help them,  and show them --  without looking it up, in a rush, and without doing myself, or the student, or the idea itself, any dishonour.

Thank you, David...

Thank you, teacher…

Thanks, sir.

I once read something like, "you may not remember what people said or did, but you will always remember how they made you feel," and I will remember that David always made me feel like he was happy to see me and that I was welcome to sit across the table from him and engage. And there was nothing I enjoyed more. He was an interlocutor with whom the banal was strictly banned.

I have a host of stories about my time working with David at Central Tech that give me abiding pleasure. David is unique in that I have so many strong remembrances, distilled in time, that come so easily to me whenever I think of him. I have never met anyone like him, before or since, and the following are little pieces of memories I have of David:

- David read the paper every day, and I need only sit for a moment and he would update me on the egregious conduct of our country's leaders and the latest outrageousness of the government south of the border.

- David was a man known for his erudition and epicurean proclivities. He loved to regale an interlocutor with the little known scandals of history, such as the licentious life and horrible death of Edward II and the more salacious aspects of Napoleon’s letters to Josephine. I will remember that David had an accompanying gesture for the climatic moments of a narrative; he would tap the table with his hand, three little taps, as though to say, “there you have it.”

- David never missed any of my parties. He always arrived with a bottle of single malt and he taught me how to drink it and to make obversations that include the words "peat," "pepper," and "slate."

- We once had a debate about what was worse; cheap white wine, or cheap red wine?

- I felt like David and I were kindred spirits. David and I were both cancers. We would make jokes about our failed love lives (we jointly held the departmental and probably even the faculty record for most marriages and unmarriages) attributing them to our crab-like qualities: succulent meat housed in impenetrable shells. We used to jokingly plan to meet for our birthdays under the arc de triomphe.

- David used to assign wonderful and apt systems of nomenclature to my outfits. One that I remember in particular that he had assigned to a pair of riding boots and pants with a blazer was “white Kenyan settler afraid of the Mau Mau.”

- I remember he once told me that he used the elevator as a rule because he had perfect knees, which he wished to preserve.

I wish he had lived to have another lunch at the Boulevard Café with me; a long white wine lunch with an espresso finale. I have been gone for a year and a half now and to me, David is there, at the long table that stretched the length of the departmental office, where I always expect him to be, welcoming me to sit down and engage. 

Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither.

Today was the first day back after the holidays, and a couple of students spoke to me, in the library, about their teacher Mr. Llewellyn. His students are easily identifiable because they carry around titles like Heart of Darkness, Nausea, The Plague, No Exit. They found their teacher to be funny and smart, not pushy, and they learned a lot from him.

One student told me that David had a pizza party for his fifth period grade 12 English class on the final day of his life. They all enjoyed themselves.This student had been the last one to leave the classroom, and it later struck him that he was the very last student David spoke to. This student went home and stayed up to the wee hours finishing his Hamlet essay to submit the next day, the last school day before the winter break. He was sad that "Mr. Llewellyn will never read my essay".

I wish David could have heard how his students talked about him. 

I considered Dave my best friend.  We kept in touch regularly since knowing each other at Northmount Junior High when we were 15. Back then, Dave was considered a thug, mostly because of his shiny black hair and piercing eyes and his tendency to sneer. People didn't want to mess with him.  He was considered a tough guy.  I was attracted to his "bad boy" reputation. We were both bad boys but shared a interest in literature and poetry. I leaned more towards philosophy, and the works of Hegel and Marx, while Dave, a polymath, always kept his options open. We talked incessanty about our girlfriends, our parents, our other friends, and whether or not life  was worth living.  Was life an accident with no meaning? What about the sacred teachings of the great religous masters? What would Celine or Beckett, or Our Lady of the Flowers (Genet) have to say about this or that?  Was Dave a cynic or a skeptic?  What were his secret longings?  What really motivated us?  We analyzed everything, over-analyzed everything, it was difficult to shut down our minds when we were together.   I had written a Canadian bestseller at age 29, and went on to publish and edit another 45 books, while Dave, a master wordsmith, never blessed the world with his published work. And while we are not able to share in his genius through the pages of his work, those of us who knew him will continue to revere his words. Dave taught me to write. To think.  In the early days were thought of ourselves as Kerouac and Cassidy. And then, we each took on the persona of Dylan Thomas. Dave did it better because he was the superior poet and the heavier drinker.  We might have been bombastic and pompous during those years but we knew we were fragile beings.  Several of our friends commited suicide. Whoever tells you the 1960s was just a magical carpet ride wasn't there.  We wanted to stay alive but we weren't sure why.  Each week we went down to Yorkville Village to purchase the psychedelic of the day. We sat in coffee houses watching young women in Cleopatra makeup and Pre-Raphaelite hair, and wearing medieval-style cloaks, and searched for our muse of the week.  We read Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton and Nothrop Frye and of course Dave always had some esoteric volume tucked away in his pocket--say, a little known 17th century poet, a volume that told you that Dave was very serious about what he read. Dave made himself available to listen to me, to help me work through tragedies that struck me a handful of times over the years. I have found that we often blunder through life, arms flailing, and sometimes if we are lucky we make the right choice of life makes the choice for us.  I didn't choose to meet Dave at 15, but it was the right choice for both of us. I loved that man, and his presence will forever be felt in my life.

by Maureen (Llewellyn) Griffith

I like to think that David’s love for Shakespeare was born back in my high school years.  In those days, we studied a play each year, from grade 9 to 13.  My way of studying was to play a record, which I would get from the North York Library, reading it aloud along with the magnificent British Shakespearean actors, whose delivery made the language very understandable.  The noise from my bedroom would alert David, even if he had been watching cartoons, and he would slip into my room, with eyes growing ever bigger.  If it was a dramatic sword fencing scene, he would grab a hairbrush, and I a comb, and the battle royals would take place and spill out into the hallway.  Remember he was nine years younger than me!  I was always amazed that such a little boy could go from watching cartoons one minute to understanding and appreciating Henry V the next! 

Every school holiday, he would ask me to take him to the Royal Ontario Museum to see the armour and the pictures and the dioramas of “Indians”, etc.  I was always amazed that his little legs would eagerly keep up with me as we walked the mile along Hounslow Avenue to Yonge Street.  There we caught the bus from Willowdale to the Toronto City Limits, and then changed to the trolley bus at Eglinton (before the subway opened) which took us all the way to Bloor Street.  From there, we would walk to the ROM on Avenue Road.  We then spent the day pouring over the treasures at the museum.  David never seemed to tire, and if the weather was good we would walk down Philosopher’s Walk and admire Trinity College and the U of T architecture.  These were spirit affirming times for both of us as we were reminded of the beautiful Cardiff Centre and Castle we had left behind, while at the same time bonding us even more firmly to the beautiful new country that we were exploring and learning to love.

There’s no denying it, David loved to eat.  I got a visceral delight from serving him his meals and watching his eyes light up with childlike enthusiasm as he surveyed the evening’s culinary offering.  Shaun and I always plated David’s food for him ourselves when we ate at home in an effort to control his portion sizes.  It generally worked, as he was normally content to eat what we served him but would invariably take twice as much if he served himself.

Whenever Shaun accused David of being a glutton, he would at first deny it and then respond by telling us amusing anecdotes about "real" historical gluttons, like the German composer Handel, who loved eating so much, and became so morbidly obese as a result, that he had a special dining table constructed with a huge curved opening cut out of its side to accommodate his gigantic belly, or King George IV, whose regular breakfast consisted of two whole partridge pies along with a giant bowl of stewed beef brisket and potatoes, washed down with multiple bottles of champagne.  The King's dinner would invariably be a ten or twelve course affair consisting of enormous slabs of fatty meats, pastries, pies, cakes, and puddings, all smothered in sauces that were so rich they’d even give a Frenchman a bellyache.  George IV suffered from gout and was rumoured to have the biggest tapeworm in his entire realm.  We liked to joke with David that he should look into having a doctor implant him with a tapeworm of his own as a weight loss measure.

David was obsessed with condiments.  Every summer when he came to stay with us, an entire shelf in our fridge would quickly fill up with various exotic chutneys and pickles, red onion marmalade, piccalilly, mint jelly, an assortment of French and English mustards, garlic and herb infused mayonaise, tartar sauce, etc, etc.  His favourite condiment of all was “Gentleman’s Relish”, a salty, fermented anchovy paste with the most pungent, fishy flavour one could possibly imagine.  Any more than a wafer thin layer of it spread on a piece of buttered toast and one risked permanently damaging one’s taste buds.  David was giddy with excitement the day he found it at Fortnum & Mason, a cavernous and impossibly posh grocery/department store, replete with plush velvet carpets, gilded doorways and ornately decorated walls, dating from the early days of the British Empire.  Shaun couldn’t stand the stuff, but David and I both loved it.

David was an expert at cooking meat and we often left the preparation of the “Sunday roast” to his capable hands.  The concept of vegetarianism was completely anathema to him: he liked to joke that “It’s not a meal unless an animal dies.”  Joking aside, Shaun constantly nagged David about his overeating and did everything she could to encourage him to eat less and make healthier choices.  She always told him that he’d get more total enjoyment from eating over the course of his entire life if he would only slow down and learn to pace himself better.  Whenever David went out by himself, the first thing she’d ask him when he returned was what he had for lunch and he’d almost always say he had a sandwich at Pret a Manger -- a popular chain restaurant that serves healthy, low-calorie soups and sandwiches.  Shaun never believed him and her suspicions were confirmed one day when she was cleaning David’s room and found a number of receipts for fish & chips and steak burgers, along with pints of beer, lying about.  Even though he’d been caught red-handed, David refused to come clean and instead grouchily accused Shaun of “taking the piss out of” him and planting the receipts herself!

Another of my favourite things to do with Dave was parent-teacher night. The English department at CTS is always deployed in the library, and Dave and I some years ago set up our shop together in the little AV room adjacent to the library. I try now to remember how many years it has been that we did so. I no longer have a recollection of parents' night that is not anchored by the feeling of Dave and me sequestered away in our own little clubhouse, some errant boys' tree fort tucked safely away from the rest of the crowd. It came to make the whole affair a little easier.

Between parent interviews, Dave would usually regale me with outrageous or shocking stories drawn from his considerable years of worldly experience: his own youth, the more hilarious tales drawn from his family history, his days as a Yorkville hippie. We would giggle and snort, until a parent appeared at the door asking for either of us, at which point we would immediately become pictures of composure and professionalism, tidying piles of paper, arranging pens. Obviously, too, we would talk about the students whose parents we had just met, and our classes, and the state of learning and education then prevalent in the world. And politics. I loved to talk politics with Dave, and we would often go over the most recent municipal, or provincial, or federal chicaneries. Or David would tell me what he was reading at that given time, as he was always sure to be reading something unexpected, and fascinating. I remember him on one occasion reading Catullus, and having two different translations with him. David made a point of demonstrating which of the two more accurately captured the Latin's depraved semantic undercurrents in one or two of the poems. We sniggered like kids looking up dirty words in a dictionary. Sometimes I would have to get up, and leave the AV room, to compose myself, in an effort to pull together the vocational persona. When most amused, especially on salacious points, Dave would actually shake, with both hands held slightly out in front, palms down, hands trembling, laughing with his tongue between his teeth.

I'm afraid that Dave was better at shocking me than I was at shocking him. Still, I did in fact talk to Dave in the library AV room in a way that I did at no other time in my working life, especially when the conversation turned to relationships. Indeed, I would say that my conversations with Dave on parents' night, brief though they may have been, remind me of some of the conversations I've had with my own brother.

I have many more parents' nights to complete. I will not pass another without remembering David Llewellyn, nor will any transpire without me wishing he was there.

This is not a story so much as a reminiscence.

From the abundance of my memories of Dave, I choose now the comfort of our many shared cigarettes, nearly all of which were enjoyed by the south-east doors on Borden Street. ...in stunning cold, when the smoke and steam of chilled breath were more or less indistinguishable, and when we would (in the interest of brevity) forgo the normal luxury of a coat. ...in the brilliance of spring sunshine, with students lazing on the nearby grass, or playing catch with a football, raucously, in the middle of Borden street itself. Some of them were hurried, three-minute-smokes, between classes. And some were langourous, taken at the end of the day, when the cigarette was a reward and not a compulsion. Many were immediately following lunch, and felt rich beyond reckoning... miniature paradises of repose, expansive, and full-bellied. Dave liked to eat, and I enjoyed particularly those cigarettes shared after his cherished, if rushed, lunch.

All smokes were shared with as much laughter as any conversation could imaginably contain during one, or sometimes two cigarettes. I have never known better company over a cigarette than David Llewellyn's. Learned, witty, sardonic, wise. And there were many of us who would congregate: two Nancys, Ann Louise, Lee, Naomi, Donna, Hannes, to name a few... if we were to add up all of the five-minutes-heres, and ten-minutes-theres, two or three times a day, for almost a decade, I think we would have as much time as many friends manage to cobble together in more healthy, less guiltily shared endeavours.

And then Dave quit.

We couldn't believe it, though I don't think I've ever known anyone to be on Zyban and the patch (simultaneously) for as long as Dave was. I haven't had a smoke for three years, and in the beginning of this sad and joyless abstention I would say, daily, hourly, "If Dave of all people can quit, so can you." I suspected David of enjoying his tobacco more than I did mine, and therein lay the essence of his character, and of his appeal. I think that David enjoyed many things more than most of us. His appreciation of all things might have been a little deeper, a little richer.

And now my life is... smokeless.

But I will certainly remember smoking with David.

Near our flat in Camberwell, South London, is a road called Medlar Street.  I’d never given any thought to it.  Passing by it on the bus one day with David, he pointed out that medlars are a crabapple-like fruit that were widely eaten in the Middle Ages and that they had to “bletted” - a kind of ripening process - on a bed of straw.  Jokingly, I accused him of making up nonsense or surreptitiously consulting Wikipedia (I knew he didn’t have a mobile phone) and he responded by telling me that Shakespeare refers to medlars in Measure for Measure, which, he noted  “isn’t his best play” and has “a rather laboured plot.”  This casual chat during a boring bus ride, which he enlivened with an anecdote about an obscure fruit and a critical commentary on one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, was typical of the sort of ordinary but extraordinary conversation one could have with David at any moment.  He was a wealth of knowledge, a man of vast erudition, who knew so many “factoids”, as he liked to call them, that you could ask him virtually anything about anything and always expect to get a well-informed and entertaining response.

That summer, David became obsessed with finding both medlars and an obscure herb called borage, the latter of which he’d learned tasted of cucumber and was one of the traditional ingredients in a Pimm’s cocktail.  We looked all over London for both, but without success.  We finally stumbled upon medlars, by chance, in a walled garden at Coughton Court, a Tudor country house in Warwickshire.  Later that same day, we found borage in the “physic” garden of a medieval church.

I first met David shortly after I met Shaun, early in the spring of the year 2000.  At the time, I was a graduate student in Philosophy at the U of T.  I was attending a seminar on Kant and wrestling with a notoriously difficult topic from the Critique of Pure Reason that I had to submit a paper on the following week.  I mentioned this in passing to David over dinner.  As it happened, David had just spent the better part of two years systematically devouring the entire history of western philosophy, including, of course, the finer points of Kantian metaphysics!  (Shaun recalls David sending her on thankless missions to the university library to retrieve weighty tomes with lengthy and obscure titles, like Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science and Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.)  A long and enlightening conversation ensued, our metaphysical speculations becoming ever more passionate and outlandish as the night wore on and the wine continued to flow.  I knew then and there that I had just met a kindred spirit and a lifelong friend, and so it was until fate cruelly and surreptitiously took David from us at much too young an age.

In 2008, we rented a cottage in Polperro, Cornwall, for a week.  Polperro is a tiny, traditional fishing village that dates from the eighteenth century and is arranged around steep, narrow streets, making it impassable by car.  David was looking forward to our stay, but on the way there I’d been winding him up by telling him how the streets were really narrow and steep and we would have to drag all of our luggage and groceries to the cottage on foot.  David, as everyone knows, was not keen on any kind of physical exertion.  He was much like Noel Coward, who joked, “Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I stand up until the feeling passes”.  Finally, when we arrived in Polperro, I revealed to David that there was a local who would transport our things with a quad bike for twenty pounds.  He turned to me and said, with both seriousness and pride, “I’d pay a hundred, Shaun”.  David was practically triumphant when the fellow offered not only to haul the luggage, but to give him a lift as well.

The Cotswolds, with its rolling countryside and honey limestone buildings, was one of David’s favourite places in England.  He especially loved the picturesque town of Painswick, as well as Broadway Tower, which the members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood used to visit for its dramatic outlook over the rural landscape (I learned this from David, of course).  We went on a couple of road trips to the Cotswolds, always trashing rental cars in the process and always passing through Oxford, where David liked to make a pilgrimage to the Bodleian Library, with stops at the Turf Tavern and Blackwell’s bookshop along the way.

Our annual road trip this summer was to North Wales.  We visited Llangollen, home to the prettiest pub in all of the Britain, the Corn Mill, which partially straddles the river Dee and has rapids flowing beneath it which still turn its 400 year old mill.  We also toured the ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey, damaged but not entirely destroyed by Henry VIII, and drove along the seaside to Harlech Castle.  On the days when Randall and I went hiking in Snowdonia, we’d drop David off in some picturesque village where he would amble about looking for bookstores, talking to the locals, and searching out the best bitters and ciders.

While planning the trip, I advised David that we expected him to regale us with fascinating historical anecdotes and “lots of lore”.  As usual, he didn’t disappoint.  He told us about Llewellyn the Great, the Welsh attempts to prevent the English from colonising their nation, and their final and tragic defeat.  David seemed genuinely moved to be back in his homeland.  The beauty of North Wales, with its varied, almost mystical landscape and perfectly kept stone villages, stirred up his Welsh pride.  I remember him looking out the window of the Corn Mill pub and saying that “this scene, with its swiftly flowing river coming down a steep mountainside, is the quintessential Welsh landscape.”  Returning from Wales via the English town, Chester, David surveyed the various uninspired, red brick buildings and complained that “the bloody English don’t know how to build a decent town!”

Our last hoorah this summer was a trip to Wynyard Hall in North Yorkshire.  David was really excited about staying at this country house, which is one of the grandest in the whole of the Britain and has hosted many famous figures, including the Duke of Wellington, Benjamin Disraeli, and Winston Churchill.  While there, he and I went on a “hike” to a folly beside the lake and had high tea in the drawing room.  He very much approved of the country house dinner ritual, which involved cocktails and canapes on the terrace, a three course dinner in the velvet-lined dining hall, and finally coffee and petit fours in the library.  He described this gastronomic decadence as “civilised” and “proper”.