Early this month we got the very sad news from our friend Bernie that his wife Anne had died, following her second liver transplant just before Christmas. Anne was a fellow public sector accountant and I'd known her since the mid-nineties. Bernie and Anne came out to see us when La Fulica was in Catania harbour in Sicily in August 2003, when we were in the middle of that fantastic hot summer cruising the Italian coast and islands. They did us the great and very generous favour of paying for us to jojn them in the Villa Politi, a beautiful hotel with pool in Syracusa. Later they came to visit us in Puglia. Anne's liver failed catastrophically and without warning about ten years ago and she showed enormous courage and determination over her first transplant, which gave her another decade of active life. She was such a force in life it's hard to comprehend she's no longer here and I'm sad we didn't see her more often in recent years.
Last week my ex-wife Rosemary called to say hello, assuming we'd received her Christmas card saying that her mum Joyce had died in September. We hadn't got the card, but it came as not entirely unexpected news as she'd been poorly for a while. I only met Joyce once after to my marriage ended in 1989/90 and that was twenty years later in 2010 when I was doing an interim management job with Nottingham City Homes and I visited her, Rosemary and her brother David in the family home in Kimberley. She seemed little changed from the placid and affectionate woman I knew all those years ago. Her life was limited by her upbringing and social circumstances and I well remember the family teas, pretty much the same every day, of salad, ham, pork pie, salad cream etc etc, when Rosemary and I used to visit. Although I remember those times I find it hard to recognise the me of today in the me I was then and with Joyce's death just a little bit more of the past seems to have become that little bit more distant. RIP Joyce, you were a decent soul doing your best.
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