Recent Bereavement

Hello everyone,

Apologies for the blog being so light over the weekend: sadly my Grandmother, Elizabeth Grey, passed away yesterday morning after suffering a heart attack. I will be up in London for the funeral at some point in the future, but for now would like to thank all those I know who passed on their sympathies to me yesterday: it was greatly appreciated. The news did come as a slight shock, but she had a good innings and she went peacefully, and I am grateful for that.

I would also like to dedicate at least part of this blog to my grandmother, as a great deal of my time during the election campaign was spent in her company. She was exceptionally adept at discussing politics to the last, and a great deal of my knowledge about both past and present governments is largely thanks to her (especially about that "crook" Harold Wilson, and the politics of Northern Ireland). She also made a point of giving me far too much food in the mornings, but grandmothers do have a habit of spoiling their grandchildren, and mine was no exception.

Possibly one of the most amusing incidents during the election campaign was when I brought a copy of the Guardian into her house: my Gran is instinctively Conservative, and she was quite glad when I recycled the offending copy! That said, she never paid much attention to the newspapers: as long as she listened to Desert Island Discs on a Sunday, got the occasional tenner on the lottery, and lived under a strong (and preferably Conservative) Government, she was happy. She will have died safe in the knowledge that the Tories were in power: it's the way she would have wanted it.

R.I.P. Gran. "Hello, 0929?" won't sound quite the same on the phone now.

The Evening Stanners