I am going back more than 20 years ago, not long after Paul and Coral had bought and moved into their new home and I had moved into mine. I had decided to install a wood burning stove at my house and Paul had already decided to do the same. We got talking about regulations and chimney liners, which were quite an expensive outlay if you decided to get them done by tradespeople. So, I was interested to find that Paul had an alternative, cheaper solution to do it himself with a metal liner fed up the existing chimney.  I worked it out and it was indeed a sizeable saving and I decided that this was the way to go. Paul kept me informed how the work was going and told me that the metal liner fed up the existing chimney more easily in some places compared to others, where a little bit of persuasion was needed. Not long after installation, and with the weather turning cold, Paul and Coral had their first fire. Going to sleep that evening, allowing the fire to burn itself out during the night, Paul and Coral awoke in the morning to see their log burner levitating an inch or so above the floor!

What had happened was that the metal liner, firmly attached to the top of the log burner, had expanded with the heat of the fire to drive the liner further up the chimney where it had become wedged tight. Upon contraction of the liner, the log burner was lifted from the floor to give birth to the legend of the “amazing levitating log burner”.

Paul could hardly contain his laughter as he told me what had happened, and his perfect timing saved me from making the same mistake.

Now Paul will be missed by different people for many different reasons, however, for me, as a working colleague and fellow DIY enthusiast, this story reminds me of a few of Paul's attributes as follows.

He could always think of alternative ways to solve a problem.
He was always willing to share his experience.
He always had a sense of humour, which included laughing at himself on occasions.

Although this wasn’t one of Paul's best solutions, he was someone you would seek out for advice, as he had so many more successes than failures to draw from within his vast tool bag of experience. Me, and certainly many of Paul's colleagues, that came from a unique family of controls engineers, collectively known as Controls Design Support, will miss Paul for the aforementioned reasons and so many more.

Ian Kingman