Alex

Nearly 9 month old.

A couple of days after Christmas my step dad died. He had been battling cancer for a couple of years...but it didn't make it any less of a shock for me. He had been with my mother for over 20 years, and they'd been married for over a decade. He was kind and funny, he never tried to push himself into the role of a parent but was always happy to be my friend. We got to spend Christmas together, and he was really happy to see Tabitha...I'm glad I got to say good bye and tell him I loved him...

Here are some of my memories of Alex:

• I remember one of the first times we met him it had snowed really heavily and we went up for a walk on the moors and jumped off walls into drifts of snow, i was so small i had to walk in his foot prints so i wouldn't get stuck.
• He came for dinner at our house for the first times and i told him he had dandruff (i was 5-6 years old and lacked all tact) i still feel guilty about that.
• he used to let us ride on his back pretending to be a donkey.
• he came to all the plays I've been in, including the ones from after i went to university.
• one year on holiday in Scotland, he started 'playing football with the sheep' gently kicking a foot ball at them and making 'baa'ing noises to them to general hilarity...until he realized that these were the pregnant ewes, and that this was probably a bad idea. 
• he was always walking off, when we were on holiday or in a museum or art gallery, we'd suddenly look around and realize that he'd wandered off on his own to look at something else or go into a shop we hadn't seen... he always caught up with us eventually.
• we went to see Dark Shadow's and he thought it was just awful, every time after we went to the movies he'd make a comment about hoping we weren't going to see 'that movie'.
• before him and my mum lived together he used to live in the servants part of a stately home, it was massive and freezing cold, and he used to practically live off cheese and honey (a surprisingly good combination) and pasta and pesto. as he never had any other food in his house
• we had an actual working fireplace at our house, and it was always his job to light the fire because we could never get it to catch, and he'd always (gently) tell me off for playing with the fire because it meant it didn't burn properly.
• he made candles out of the wax he got from his bees, he hated me messing with the wax to get dribbly candles.
• he was one of the only people crazy enough to go swimming with me in the sea in Scotland in winter.
• one year on holiday a big group went on a walk, i stayed at the house. it started getting late and they weren't back from the walk yet, i started getting nervous. eventually (it was starting to get dark) i got a phone call saying that they were lost, but they were on a beach somewhere, and Alex had gone to find where they were...about 30 minutes later i got another phone call saying that Alex wasn't back yet and now my mum had gone to look for him...they did all get back eventually after being rescued by someone with a boat!
• in Scotland someone had built a barrel raft and he wanted to see if it would float, so he got on it and let it float out...into a strong current...when he had no paddle or way to get back in again... luckily it came back into shore and onto some rocks.
• when i was little we went on a long walk, about half way i was just exhausted, it was really rough and wet terrain, the rain was coming down and i just wasn't coping...my mum and my sister went ahead while he stayed behind with me, the sun came out and we spent the rest of the day till they came back to us scrambling over rocks and picking bilberries for pancakes later.

he never lost his temper, i never knew him say an unkind word, he had a quiet way about him that's hard to describe, and he wasn't afraid to be silly. he was a wonderful man, generous and loving.
I will miss him terribly.