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This paper aims to pay tribute to John Bowlby on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, drawing on the author's experience of fortnightly supervision with him from 1985 to 1990. Bowlby was a warm, caring, unassuming, and undogmatic supervisor who was respectful of people who did not think like him. He encouraged the author to integrate the different parts of his Tavistock Clinic's training, develop his own thinking, and provide a secure base for his patients. Reference is also made to Bowlby's contagious optimism about life, despite human aggression and destructiveness—which he understood not as manifestations of a postulated death instinct but as attachment crises.