My dad never wanted to just sit in an office. He went to uni after school because it was expected but he didn't enjoy it. He spent the first year doing no work, just the bear minimum to pass. He passed the first year exactly on the threshold and decided there was no point doing it if he wasn't enjoying it.
He then spent a few years doing various jobs and travelling. He motorbiked around the world, he hitchhiked from Britain to Morocco and got a job picking grapes in the summer. He worked as a farm labourer, a bus driver, lorry driver. I remember counting up all the different jobs he's worked, it was easily 30 but I honestly can't remember what he got to. For a long time he worked as a dispatch rider in London, and was pretty good at it. It was quite dangerous though, and quite a few of the people he worked with there died.
He went back to being a bus driver again for a bit, both in the UK and abroad. He's got lots of cool stories there - people with guns forcing him to drive through border control in various eastern european countries, an 18-hour detour because of a bombed bridge in Croatia, driving a police team to a raid and having them leave classified documents on the bus. Towards the end of his bus driving, he was driving a bus for a school trip. The kids' teacher was terrible, but paid maybe twice what my dad was. So my dad decided to go back to uni.
He went back to uni, and got a PGCE (which is where he met my mum). He went into teaching and six weeks in he decided it wasn't for him. He handed in his notice and was gone after eleven weeks.
He went back to doing various odd jobs for a while. He'd been lucky with the explosion of the housing market and was able to take the house he'd bought for ~£4k and sell it for ~£100k. He and my mum bought a farm and moved there in the late eighties.
They were both hippy city-people, from London, so a Welsh farming community wasn't that welcoming of them but over the next ten years or so they started to fit in and made a lot of friends. I was born in 1995. I have some memories of farm animals - mostly sheep, but some cows too - but my parents stopped farming when I was very young. My dad's back got really bad and he had to give up farming when I was maybe 3 or so. We kept the farm, but rented out the fields.
My parents seperated when I was 5. They kept everything cordial and my mum bought a house a few miles away. I split my time pretty much equally between both. We scraped by with the rent from the fields but our income was probably technically below the poverty line - it never really affected me because my dad never really cared for expensive things.
I spent a lot of time with my dad growing up. Because of his back, he couldn't have a job. Living on a farm, there was lots of maintenance to do. When it rained, for example, we'd have to go out with twenty metre-long pipes to unblock the ditches. This was really bad for his back and things like this would leave him bedridden for weeks.
Nonetheless he made a huge effort to be there for me. When I was maybe three or so, we made a metre stick together. As I got older, we'd make swords for me to play with by using wood from trees we'd cut down. They were pretty good - it's probably fifteen years later and we gave one to a family friend, who gets the enjoyment from playing with it. We built a giant 'treehouse' - we took four telephone posts and they formed the corners. There were sheets of plywood for the floor and the walls. I used a jigsaw to cut a round door in the plywood, and we attached it with hinges. It was maybe two metres off the ground, and you could get up either with a ladder or by climbing the telephone poles.
His back continued to get worse and when I was around fifteen years old we moved away to the biggest town around. When I say big, I mean huge - bigger than any of the villages for miles around. It had a population of less than a thousand.
These days he can't travel very far because of his back - he recently managed to travel about 20 miles in the car, which is the furthest he's gone in maybe a decade. He's still active though; he walks several times a day and swims every day of the week.
His degree was in a science, and he qualified as a physics teacher, though he never used it. We think in a very similar way and I've always really liked talking to him. I moved away for university a couple years ago and I call him every week or so, we can always talk for hours.
He's very generous - both with his time and with his money. When he was making less than £15000 a year ($20000) he'd still give £5000 a year to charity. Recently one of the charities he gives to regularly contacted him and told him he's given them £80000 pounds in total.
As I mentioned before, he split up with my mum when I was around five. The way they handled that breakup is honestly a really good inspiration for me. Even when they don't particularly like being around each other, they are always there for each other - especially at the start before they both had new partners. Mum's car doesn't work? Dad'll be there with jumper cables, no problem.
He had a couple of girlfriends after my mum died, before he met his current partner when I was around seven. She's a really nice woman, and we get along great too. He says he's happier with her than he's ever been in his life.
To anyone looking in, the problems with his back seem like a horrible thing - and they are. But he's glad for it. He got to spend a lot of time with me growing up and he's really glad about that.
He's an amazing person and an amazing father.