A year ago today, Scots blogger Kevin Gray posted the final daily item at Nothing To Do With Arbroath, a “daily mish-mash” and perhaps the best blog ever to grace the web.
He posted again a few times to update readers on the serious illness that was consuming him, but the last we saw of Gray’s inimitable eye for “stuff, fluff and nonsense” was this photo of police helping a family of ducks cross the road, published on November 23, 2016. A final update warned readers he had months to live, not years; he died days later, aged 56.
I’m thankful for many things this year, but none more so that my baby son and Kevin Gray. May his sense of wonder still guide us onward, with the diligent empathy of a Japanese traffic police officer, through chaos and heavy traffic.