I had a lot of fun times with my grandfather when I was a boy and went to stay with him and my grandmother for seaside holidays at the Miramar Hotel in Bournemouth on the south coast of England. We played endless word games and I asked him innumerable questions about Middle Earth and he was always kind and affectionate. I can close my eyes and see him now, wreathed in smoke like Gandalf as he lit his pipe with a flaring Swan Vesta match and spoke in a deep voice about dragons and dwarves. In the afternoons we went for long walks along the beach with the wind in our faces and he showed me just the right thin black stones for skimming out into the waves, and yet, however hard I tried, I never managed to skim mine as far as his, even though he was sixty-seven years older than me. But I know that this doesn't matter. I don't need to compete with my grandfather's legacy. Instead, now that I have something that I have created that I can be proud of myself, I can start being proud of being the grandson of a genius and rejoice in the fact that I may have inherited a few of his creative genes. Now I have come to terms with it, I realize it's a wonderful inheritance.

Ardamir wrote:
Great, thanks for that, Trotter. But can that really be Simon? He looks just as tall as his grandfather.