By Roger Hearing

To most of you here today, David was FATHER. To us, his family, of course, father is the one thing David wasn’t. A much-loved brother, son, uncle, a great-uncle too – the person whose choice of birthday card or Christmas present could be counted on to surprise; the card, or, often, the postcard coming with an observation, or a question – David was always keen to challenge, in the kindest way possible, our too-comfortable thoughts.

It’s hard to sum up a life so various, so full, but in the same way a family photo album holds instances, images, moments by which we remember a person, I’d like to pull out a few of our moments.

The four-year-old in wartime Worcester Park who’d done his first day at school, having to be dragged bodily back on day two – he had BEEN to school, he protested. He’d done all the learning that was necessary.

The stubborn lad who would take some pleasure insisting, to his older sister’s fury, that the weapon deployed against German bombers was an AUNTY aircraft gun

Much later – the lithe young, unreasonably cool Cambridge chaplain, enjoying a late sixties summer-of-love punting party on the river, falling in… and being unnecessarily rescued by… just about everyone.

The running, dodging protest priest determined to make it across the narrow lawn surrounding the Ministry of Defence to scrawl a cross on its concrete walls and make a point about nuclear weapons, as well as striving not to injure the policeman who rather gently rugby tackled him

The semi-retired gentleman who, confronted by the huge spiral slide at Tate Modern, decided it was not just for children, and came whizzing down, with a broad smile and a sense of perverse achievement

David could find the joy in almost anything. What echoes to me is his phrase – hands open and wide, when something really pleased him and fitted his ideal of the simple and the good –  “Lovely, lovely” I hope, I suspect – somewhere he is saying that now.