James William Edward – three kings as he liked to notice – or just Jim, was a man with massive passion and enthusiasms.

He was passionate about ideas, about people.
About books, about art.
About football.

About politics: He joined the Labour Party when he was 11, after reading about the Jarrow marches. When he died his wallet was full of membership cards spreading back over the years.

About travel: the list of places he went to is long and extra-ordinary, as was the timing of many. India during the war, as a young man suddenly commanding hundreds of troops. East Germany in early sixties, Czechoslovakia just in time for the Russian Invasion, France, Italy, China just after the Cultural Revolution, Portugal in time for their revolution, Japan, America, Korea….

It’s a list that has to make you wonder. Was Jim Root a buyer of china and glass? Or an international spy? Who knows?

My dad loved telling a good story, more often or not with a little exaggeration thrown in: “If it makes it a better story...” he would say.

But on the spying connection he would only ever laugh at, neither confirm or deny, neither confirm or deny….

But it certainly is true that Jim he was no stranger to adventure, to risk, to trying new things.

He had a strong belief that on any menu you should always order the thing you've never eaten before, whatever it might be.

As children, he made us squirm with his story of being ceremonially presented with a fish head including eyeball at a Chinese banquet.

This may or may not have been true.

He was never happier when he had a new passion of the moment. The whole family would get caught up in them.

There was the sailing phase.

And the photography one.

The wild-flower years – I remember him stretched out on his stomach on the grassy intersection between two streams of traffic photographing flowers.

After that was the industrial archeology period.

There was making stuff: "Just hold that piece of wood there..." was one of the most frequently heard phrases of my childhood. He was so proud that both Helen and Liam inherited his passion and skill at making things with their hands.

There was gardening, but only the type that looks wild and 'flops' with no bare earth visible during the summer. His had a long list of plants no garden should be without: variegated shrubs, siiriggiams, forget-me-nots, tree poppies, phlox, daisies, daffodils.

They were compulsory: well at least I never tried to argue against them.

Gardening overlapped a bit uncomfortably with one of the other things he loved– animals. Dogs, cats – but especially badgers. His ‘black and white friends’, as he liked to call them, lived in huge numbers in his garden in Benfleet, digging vast underground networks of tunnels, and almost gleefully flipping up anything he planted. He liked to marvel how he’d perfected ‘gardening with badgers’ as a rare, specialty form of horticulture.

If these enthusiasms – some fleeting, mostly lifelong, sound a bit kid-like, then perhaps they were.

Maybe it’s because he really was a big kid himself.

He delighted in Christmas and huge decorating projects we would all help with.

On the beach he loved building complicated sandcastle cities: he liked to start an earthworks and see how many children he could get to join in. Sometimes we’d end up with 20 or 30 children as part of the grand project.

Family and children were the heart of his life. My dad loved all children.

He loved Ray and my American daughter, Molly, with whom he almost shared a birthday.

But perhaps the one he enjoyed most of all was Liam. The son he had always wanted, and now the time to really be with him.

I think of the summers in Southwold, the elaborate permanent toy train set ups– and perhaps most memorable of all the months – or was it years – they had the L and J fantasy building company. When, as an adult, Liam started his own car repair service it was called, yes, L and J.

And as for families: my dad had three.

The first was his sisters, Iris, Peggy and Gwen, and his dad and mum – who he scandalously called OG, short for Old Girl. They lived at the extraordinary place we later came to know as Plotlands, somewhere Dad never ceased to be amazed by: its industry, its inventiveness, its community. His role in the Plotlands Museum was his tribute to that first family of his.

And then there was us.  My sisters Sarah and Helen and me: we were “the girls”. Or Sind, Fishhead and Sparra - nicknames were another Jim thing “I had three sisters and now I have three daughters. Even the dog is a woman” he used to bemoan in mock despair. The early death of his daughter Sarah was one of the saddest things in his life: her commitment to charity, her church and just being good one of his proudest.

At the heart of our family was his marriage to my mother, which endured for 45years. Asked about her he would always say one thing: “she was different”. And from him that was the highest praise imaginable.

And then, surprisingly, blissfully, there was his and Shelia’s family.

“Do you remember Sheila Rose?” he asked me soon after they had met again, and of course I did. It takes nothing away from his long marriage to my mother to say that Sheila was the love of his life. Their excursions, their new home: I’ve seen my dad happy, but never so much as with Sheila. Their late reconnection – as he always called it – was one of the great pleasures of his life.

And so it was for all of us who got to be part of this last great family of his, and enjoy it as much as he did.

Introducing us properly to Shelia and bringing her into our family: what a joy.

And as with many things in his life it was Lucky.

The nickname his sisters gave him, with fondness and maybe even a touch of sisterly exasperation, was absolutely right.

Lucky Jim. A man who got every last ounce out of life.

Lucky Jim. That’s how we should remember him.