The last time I spoke to my dad, Ray, he said the story of his stay in hospital would make a good script. As ever, his ability to find something in the situation that I’d enjoy came to the fore. Even, in this case, when he’s suffering from cancer of the spine. A broken arm, the consequence of his weakened bones. And a chest infection that he’s finding it hard to fight because of the weakness of his immune system. I’m travelling to see him tomorrow, and maybe we’ll find out how that story ends.

My dad and stories go together. He’s told them all my life, and that’s a large part of where my love of stories comes from. When I was young, and Ray lectured at a university, many of the people he befriended were foreign students. I got to meet them, and hear their stories, and they too became part of my father’s stories. Babalola the Nigerian, whose mother was a village butcher, and instructed us to ‘feather’ the goat we kept at one point, and who on going strawberry picking with us ate pounds of the fruit when he discovered that pickers were allowed to eat them too, bringing back an empty punnet to be weighed. Seet from Singapore, who thought that the signs on the motorway with numbers in them depicted the minimum speeds that motorists should travel. Yogesvaran — Yogi — from Malaysia, who played hours long games of Risk and wooed Kamala, who was less than half his size.

And then there are the stories that Ray himself features in. Buying blouses and liqueurs at auction and keeping them in a garage at home, to be sold to a dizzying array of acquaintances. Installing an artificial tree in a pub on one or other of the jobs he acquired kitting them out with interiors, a business timed brilliantly as the breweries were looking to camouflage their profits from the Monopolies Commission and were chucking cash at the problem. Drunkenly snogging a woman not my mother on the roof of a golfcart careering down a hill in Switzerland on a family holiday. Calling his sister while she was alone at a friend’s place and saying he was from the pools company, and could she pass on a message to the lady of the house..? To be fair, he did leave enough clues in what he said for her to rumble the truth. But it was a surprisingly long time before they spoke after that.

And then there were the books that he passed on to me. I was given a set of encyclopedias that he’d read as a child, sturdy volumes with tales of Empire, and illustrations accompanying legends from Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology. Fantastic stuff, which fed my liking for the books of Henry Treece, and collections of heroic tales from different cultures. I’ve never got round to your actual Iliad and Odyssey, but I enjoyed the kids’ versions just fine.

And, thanks to my dad, I got a good education in films from an early age. I was haunted by The Red Balloon each and every time I watched it, which was lots. I followed my dad’s own childhood liking for Sabu, and it led me to The Thief of Baghdad which in turn opened up the world of 1001 Nights, which enthralls me to this day.

Later, in my teens, he took me to see Kagemusha, my first experience of Kurosawa. He’d caught the director’s samurai films as they appeared, at what were probably their only screenings in Birmingham in the days before arthouse cinema. We’ve talked film lots since then, part of the way we relate, and that continues to this day. He’s spent his retirement in fine style, watching a few decades’ worth of films he missed out on first time round, emphasising European and world cinema in the choices that drop through the mailbox once a week.

And now? My father’s story is coming to an end. Those are hard words to write. Harder to accept. But that’s how it is. Ray has led a better life than most, touched the lives of others in the process. Mine especially. And I hope I’m writing in a week that he’s making a good recovery, and will be with us for another twenty years. But that sounds a bit Hollywood to me, and that’s really not my dad’s style.