My father, Colin James Warner, was and will remain a force of nature. He would always joke that he was an anti-social man and yet everyone would gravitate towards him in any given room. He was incredibly charismatic, witty and every line or factoid he would come out with would have to be taken with not a pinch but a gallon of salt. I’m sure we’ve all at one point been a victim of his wit… my personal favourite is that he once shared with my Grandmother that his grandfather died at Auschwitz…. the catch being that he was a guard who fell out of a watchtower! It is an honour and a daunting task to pay tribute to him, he is the most brilliant man I’ve ever known and all anyone could ever hope for in a dad or in a friend. He is the rare person that would move Earth for those he cared for, without even having to be asked, without questioning. His life, his career, his adolescence, his personality – they seem almost to contradict each other at times, he was a complex man but at his very core he was decent, loving and honest… and he had the rare skill of always knowing the right thing to say without ever telling you what you wanted to hear. Colin Warner was born on the 31st of August 1957 in Hemel Hempstead and at just 9 months old was adopted by Jim and Lily Warner and raised in London along with his sister Linda. Whilst I never met his Mother, he spoke vividly about her and unlike many of the children he would later come to care for, he was fortunate to find a home in which he was loved. My dad was never a great lover of authority, a trait that he successfully managed to pass down to myself and George. He had no real interest in academics in his youth, yet over the years he amassed what would become a great fountain of useless information and whilst he never completed school, he passed with first class honours from the University of Google. At only 15 years old he joined the Army and on the day of his 18th Birthday he was shipped to Northern Ireland for his first of many tours of duty during the height of The Troubles in the 1970’s. He would tell stories of his service sparingly and you could tell that he didn’t enjoy recalling the more serious details. What we do know and what he would happily reminisce to us about with his signature cheeky grin, was that his disregard for authority was never quashed by his commanding officers. During his tenure in the Armed Forces, my Dad yoyo’d between the ranks of Private and Bombardier with the veracity of a pneumatic drill. An episode involving him and a case of an officer’s cheese collection gone missing was a particular highlight. In his early 20’s he left the Armed Forces and joined the French Foreign Legion where he served for a year, largely in peacekeeping operations across Africa. He eventually became disillusioned with life in the legion and left in the dead of night in the back of a lorry, in John Le Carre worthy fashion. For years afterwards he would always treat travelling back to France with tongue-in-cheek concern…. However…. He was never one to shy away from a booze cruise…..After leaving the forces my dad worked a number of jobs ranging from private security and investigation to night club bouncer work. He would always recall with pride how he told John Lennon’s son that he “didn’t care if he was Mickey Mouse you’re not getting in in those shoes”. During this period he met Nigel, his biological brother. They became best friends and spoke daily and even though they didn’t meet until their twenties they were extremely close friends and brothers. In the late 80’s my dad took a job with the coop working as part of their security team, the woman that hired him, Marianne, became his wife and then eventually my mother. They were an incredible team for many years, running coop’s security teams in London. They married in 1993 and I came along in ’94 and my brother, George, in ’96. They spent almost every waking hour together, they were incredible, how many couples can maintain a strong and healthy relationship both personally and professional? They created a business together in the late 90’s, Southern Care Limited, which ran a number of care houses for troubled youths and was for a long time very successful. My dad looked after the operational aspects and was excellent with dealing with these children on a straight-forward and stern level before which they weren’t accustomed, my mother was brilliant at the financial side.. although my dad would always joke that she spends too much! Eventually they closed the business and my dad spent his final working years doing cash- and-carry jobs for the likes of G4S and Loomis. His final professional act of rebellion was stashing supermarket sprat fish under the grill of one of the secure trucks on his last day… knowing that the smell wouldn’t come until he was long gone. My brother and I had a former Armed force dad and a former police officer mum so you might imagine that not much slipped past them growing up! We were incredibly lucky however, to have been raised by two parents that loved each other so deeply and would do anything for each other and us. One of my dad’s favourite sayings is that “I have seen no evidence that with greater age comes greater wisdom”, well you were wise and you were great up until the very end. The past year and a half has been exceptionally difficult for us all. We cried and we laughed through the ups and downs, the hope and the devastation. We came together as family and as friends to support my dad in this fight and we grew closer for it… and though there may be one less in our tribe we will grow closer still. I wish I could have just one more day with him, one more day to tell him how much he means to us all, but you don’t get that day. And the truth is that we were eventually on borrowed time and whilst the extra year we spent together will never be enough, I can say with absolute conviction that it was a pleasure to have known you and never, not even for a second, a burden. I love you His life was as colourful as his language and like any life worth discussing cannot possibly be served justice by such a few words. Eulogy by James Warner