Alistair’s story
Our beloved son Alistair died suddenly and unexpectedly of a brain tumour on the 7th February 2007. He was aged 42, full of life and as fit as a fiddle. Doing well in his business, with his lovely girlfriend Rachel, he had a happy and successful life ahead of him.
Suddenly and out of the blue he was rushed by ambulance to hospital late one evening, given scans and a biopsy and within a few days he was gone. We never quite caught up with the speed events took. From the time of his entering Poole General Hospital suffering from a severe headache until his death in Southampton General Hospital’s Neurological High Dependency Unit we only had him for seven very precious days. Until then we had been quite unaware that his occasional slight loss of memory meant that there was anything seriously wrong with him. Both hospitals treated him and us brilliantly.
Alistair, brother of Pippa, and uncle to Georgie and Alex, was born in November 1966 at the Nuffield Hospital in Oxford. He was educated at Lambrooke Preparatory School, Bradfield College and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst after which he completed a Short Service Commission in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars before returning to civilian life. In due course he set up a very successful marketing company for BUPA Healthcare, liaising mainly with Service personnel. His ten year marriage to Jane ended in divorce. More recently he bought a stud farm in the Purbeck Hills of Dorset where he planned to settle down and raise a family with his dear girlfriend and wife to be Rachel – herself a top class opera singer – a full and exciting life was ahead of them.
Alistair was always an outdoor person: mountaineering, white water rafting and climbing high in the Himalayas; ocean cruising widely in his motor yacht; furiously skiing the steepest of Alpine slopes, he was seldom still for a moment and always had some plan or other for a future project in his mind; he was a real goer in all senses of the word.
First and foremost Alistair was a “Free Spirit and an Adventurer”. We all miss his warm, loving and vibrant personality. We can’t believe he’s not ‘just around the corner’. In his memory we have set up a beautiful white Purbeck Stone bench on the banks of the River Frome in Wareham near where he kept his boat. We aim to contribute as much as we can to The Brain Tumour Charity and the Fund we have set up in Alistair’s name.