My father Val Myers z”l passed away on 4th February 2026. This is the text of the eulogy I delivered at his funeral.

Val, my father, was a man of many qualities and many, many, many words.

For better or worse, I, as his son, may possibly have inherited some of that latter quality. More than once it has been put to me, as his son, mainly by him, that I could talk all four legs off a donkey.

The truth is that my father could not only do the same, but also persuade the donkey to go for a walk afterwards, and then continue talking to the donkey, as it tried to leave, for a further half hour.

That’s a fairly longwinded way of saying: I’ll try and keep this relatively brief, but I can’t guarantee anything.

More than anything else, my father was a loving man.

He met the love of his life, my mother Sandie, in February 1966; they were married a little more than two years later, and - while many of their peers did not - they remained married through bad times and good, for the rest of his life. He loved his children - myself and my sister Jemma - and later, when his son-in-law Stephen, grandchildren, Dylan, Zak and Levi, and my partner Brenda joined the family, he loved them also. Everything he ever did was motivated by love.

Another thing my father loved was teaching.

He was that rare thing - a born teacher. He was literally incapable of learning anything without wanting to teach it to other people.

In his professional life, after qualifying as an accountant, he tried for a while to practice accountancy first directly, working for this or that accountancy firm, and then indirectly, in business. Watford Waste Paper was an attempt to do recycling before recycling was a thing, but in the end, running a business was not for him. It was not until he started teaching accountancy that he really found his professional niche; he would continue teaching generation after generation of accountants until retirement.

But that was only one small part of his career as a life-long educator.

When my sister and I were small, some time in the late 1970s, he taught us to play chess.

Under his tuition, both of us improved rapidly, and his genuine delight when he realised that he would never beat either of us at chess ever again could not be concealed. Within a few years he had started running a junior chess club at the Harrow Leisure Centre. Here, all-comers, mainly of middle school age, were taught everything from the basic moves to fairly advanced tactical, opening and endgame theory. Not content with that, he also taught both myself and my sister to be chess teachers ourselves, and we were roped in to provide extra tuition at the club. The road to the top echelons of chess is long and difficult, and while neither Jemma nor I made it there, several of the children who passed through Val’s chess school did end up reaching the very highest levels.

Ultimately, it was in neither accountancy nor chess where my father achieved his greatest success as a teacher.

That was in linedancing.

My Dad went to his first linedance in 1994, and less than ten years later, was a fully accredited linedance teacher and founder of the AB Coasters linedance club. Not content with this, he started creating his own series of linedances, aimed at Absolute Beginners to linedancing. From this he created a complete Absolute Beginners course, which he taught at the club - taking people from their very first linedance steps through to being able to handle anything more advanced linedancing could throw at them.

In 2007 he won the Linedancer Magazine Crystal Boot award for his beginner’s linedance Simply Mambo. While he was proud of this, and also of the fact that the shorthand ‘AB’ - which he invented - is now generally used in the linedance world to mean ‘Absolute Beginners’, he was much more proud of the fact that his beginner AB linedance teaching syllabus was - in full - freely available on his website for anyone to pick up and use to teach more people the rudiments of linedancing. He travelled all over the world teaching linedancing, and recorded over 400 instructional linedance videos with his friend Tanya on YouTube which have been viewed over eight million times.

He was also fiercely proud of his Jewish identity, was deeply concerned about the recent rise in antisemitism, and a strong supporter of Israel. While he and I often did not see eye to eye on certain issues, it was always clear that his position was fundamentally motivated by a strong sense of Ahavas Yisroel, as in the words of Maimonides: “mitzvas asei le’ehov kol echad v’echad mi’Yisroel kegufo” - “it is a positive commandment to love each one of Israel as yourself”. As always with my father, his essential motivation was from a place of love.

There is so much more to say, but this is a good place to pause.

I have not mentioned his lifelong support of Watford Football Club, his love of cats, his abiding interest in the Arthurian mythos, his wide taste in music that extended far beyond the country music repertoire of a linedancer to encompass jazz, blues, reggae, classical, folk, soul and pretty much anything that moved him or made him want to dance, and make other people dance with him.

I will leave you with a story which some of you may have already heard several times and are now about to hear again, this time from me: about twenty years ago, my Dad took me to see country legend Steve Earle in concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Just as the Steve Earle set began, we found ourselves both having an unfortunate Out Of Beer experience, so he went to the bar to remedy matters. The bar was deserted except for one stunningly beautiful woman, who waved at him to join her. He declined the invitation and returned with the beers. A few songs later, Steve Earle introduced on stage a Very Special Guest: Emmy Lou Harris. It was the same woman that Dad had declined having a drink with at the bar.

When telling this story, my father always explained it by saying that he loved his wife very very much, and therefore made a point of never drinking with strange women in bars, no matter how beautiful. It is now forever too late to enquire whether or not he had actually recognised Emmy Lou Harris, though it seems fairly obvious that he had not.

The point is that in this, as in all things, my father was motivated by love.