This is an obituary written by a brother, and the form dictates the content: a life compressed into 600 words, with the anecdotes doing the heavy lifting. The Brylcreem story — "Prince Charles doesnae go to Angus Oval" — is the whole man in miniature. A kid who wouldn't perform respectability for anyone, who carried that instinct from Glasgow to Nairobi and never lost it. Alan Ferguson's career arc is a specific type of mid-century Scottish trajectory: working-class Glasgow to Strathclyde to Bristol PhD to the developing world, propelled by geography (the discipline) and geography (the itch to be somewhere else). He arrived at Nairobi University in 1972, left over a grading dispute — a detail his brother drops without elaboration, which tells you something about family loyalty and editorial restraint — then bounced through Cambridge and Northeastern before Kenya pulled him back for good. The aid-work years are where the piece finds its real subject. Ferguson spoke Swahili, integrated with communities, worked in family planning and public health across remote rural Kenya — first for Amref, then GTZ, then freelance. His brother notes he was "different from many other foreign workers" in his curiosity about the people he served. That's a carefully placed line. It implies, without stating, what many other foreign workers were like. The marriage to Florence Miyawa in 1982 anchored the Kenya years. Three daughters. Sunday cryptic crosswords from the airmail Observer, completed and posted back to win prizes. It's a portrait of a man who built a life between two countries and was genuinely at home in both — until a bus knocked him down while jogging in 2009, ending his working life at a stroke. The final act is bleak in the way British bureaucracy specialises in: a man with serious head injuries, unable to drive or work, forced to renew his Kenyan visa every few months because he no longer had employment. He returned to Glasgow in 2014 with Florence. The piece doesn't editorialize on this. It doesn't need to. As obituary writing, this is competent family memoir — warm, selective, shaped by affection rather than craft ambition. The anecdotes are well-chosen (the Brylcreem, the hairy legs, the crosswords), the chronology is clean, and the emotional register is steady. It's not trying to be a literary obituary in the Ian Jack or Keith Waterhouse tradition. It's a brother saying goodbye in public, and it does that job with quiet dignity.
