My father, Stephen Bower, who has died of cancer aged 69, was what every child would have hoped for in a parent: a patient, funny man with a twinkle in his eye, he could blow smoke from his nostrils like a dragon and was generous with piggy-back rides.
He was born in Derby during a wartime bombing raid war, but grew up in Belfast, where his father, Edward, lectured in Latin at Queen's University and where, in due course, Edward and his wife Kathleen brought up a musical family of five children.
In the early 1960s my father left Belfast to study classics at Oxford. Visiting his sister, Libby, at York University, he met Lesley, also a student there, and they married in 1974. His feelings about my mother are evident in the many photographs he took, his love for her clear for all to see in black and white.
I was born in 1977, my brother, Jonathan, in 1980. Despite working long hours, my father was attentive and caring. He helped us with our homework and read to us, bringing the characters to life with great skill: he is my voice of Winnie the Pooh – and of Lady Bracknell.
He spent his working life at the technology and computer group IBM. In the days before laptop presentations, he used to draw diagrams on acetate slides. When I was eight, he asked me to draw an unflattering picture of him on one of the slides. I think it featured hairy ears, nose and knobbly knees; it then went into his presentation "accidentally".
A talented player of baroque music, he taught me the recorder and encouraged me to learn the piano, the violin and the saxophone. He instilled in us a love of walking and an appreciation of the British countryside as well as ploughman's lunches, pubs and Dundee cake.
Recently, as I married and had children of my own, he became a grandfather to my daughters. He would make his hand into a creature that would tiptoe around on finger-legs and investigate the little people giggling at its appearance.
He is survived by Lesley, Jonathan and me, and his granddaughters, Hulya and Selvi; and by three of his siblings, Libby, Michael and Mark.