Tony FOREVER !

It’s been lovely to read back. You’re still there my love. You’re still part of my life. Even with Rex.

Watching BB again – 15 yrs later ! – which previously we’d come to hate. And I was reminded how much you disliked carnations!

His hair brush – he was always so meticulous about his appearance, especially his mustache; we found the piece of ‘gold’ costume jewelry in the car park before the Cirque show we went to see in Toronto – it had obviously fallen from a costume at the old military  base where Soleil were preforming; that was real magic. I bought him the ‘sheriff’s star’ at Yosemite, the day that he felt too poorly to go into the national park and I left him, resting at the nearby motel [I felt so guilty that day].

It’s been a while, I guess – that’s a good sign that I’m ‘moving on’ – not forgetting, but Jeju allowed me to see new horizons, but now I’m back home, I need to clear the decks a bit and that means throwing away things that are wonderful memories, but otherwise clog the drawers!

Jewellery and notes, objects that meant so much to you and I, perhaps no one else – time to really let go, but it’s good knowing that I can see them here, any time I need to .

Between ‘Rosanne’ and ‘Friends’ was ‘Cybill’. It wasn’t big and it certainly wasn’t clever, but on a Friday night after a tough week at work, it did the trick.

Mostly, it has to be said, thanks to the camp vitriol of Cybil Shepherd’s markedly more funny sidekick, ‘Mary-Anne’.

She’s gone onto bigger and better movie roles but between 1995-1998 [good years for us], this really tickled you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3ymq23LgDs

I never got ‘Shameless’ at the time. Tony did. He bought all the DVDs – I’ve got them here. Watched episode 1 today.
I’m still not sure I get ‘Shameless’ -yes, it’s Shakespeare, it’s Brecht, Eugene O’Neill on a housing estate, but it’s so mucky and however brilliant David Threlfall is it, I can’t help feeling to a certain extent there’s an awful lot more of him in that part than his middle-class luvviness reveals attempts to hide. I remember renting ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ to show Tony – Threlfal’s Smike – now that’s a performance.
I’ll try again next week.

My beautiful man had his darker moments – mostly inspired by the following [in no particular order]

1. The Beatles – couldn’t bear them; didn’t mind the songs if sung by somone NOT a Beatle. [not a big fan of the Stones either].
2. Films with unhappy endings – he’d leave the room if something awful was going to happen [or turn his head to one side, wince, and sigh as if with a terrible headache]; couldn’t stand ‘Thelma and Louise’ [one of my favourites], because they ‘get it’ in the end, along with ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’, ‘Nicolas and Alexandra’ but not ‘Midnight Cowboy’, which was one of his favourites.
3. Disney classics – he’d seen them all when he’d been a Dad the 1st time round – loved Pixar, quite liked the new Disney’s [‘Tarzan’, ‘The Lion King’ etc.], but he’d rather push nails into his eyes than sit through ‘the Jungle Book’ another time.
4. Boardgames – oh, my God, hated them – he and his siblings would each get a snakes and ladders or similar as kids and he never liked them since.
5. Breaking the law or cheating generally – sure, he must have made some mistakes as a younger man, but 2nd life around he was a man of total integrity and if I ever tried to cut corners myself [dumping a mattress over a wall, when we moved from London, for example], he was NOT impressed !
6. Pizza – heart-attack victims are told they can eat anything except fish and chips and pizza – Tony was not heart broken ! He hated pizza. We went to the birthplace of the Chicago Deep-pan Pizza once. His idea of hell – he grimaced and grudgingly chewed joylessly throughout the whole evening.
7. ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘Dragons’ Den’ – how do I group these ? Business-based reality shows, I guess. Nope – couldn’t stand them.
8. ‘Big Brother” – started well – he loved series 1 [chickens and a lesbian nun – what’s not to love ?], he even forgave BB2 for its worse excesses when it was won by openly gay ‘Brian’ , but therafter things went VERY downhill. Probably the thing that Tony hated most !
9. My driving. I drove too fast – apparently. Sometimes good humoured about it – often very severe !
10. Visiting Art exhibitions. He could do Art Nouveau/Deco, sparkly jewellry, furniture, even the occasional painting, but once we went in a big retrospective show and I, in Tony’s words, spent ’10 minutes looking at each artwork’, he was ready to run.

11. People staring at him. I know – he had the magnificent, MAGNIFICENT moustache – what did he expect ?, but boy did he get pissed off when people stared. Tried to pass it off with good humour – blew a kiss if the wrong guy stared, but that ugly old mullet in Somerfield’s in Worcester Park in the earlt 90s was very lucky not to get a slap from my lovely man !

12. Injustice, prejudice [the normal stuff that most but not all people hate]

13. Arguments

14. Long car journeys [unsuprisingly]

Hawaii and San Francisco
TV Dance shows; Runway and Tyra
walking along the beach
bedtime
the stags
sneezes
our civil ceremony
‘holding hands in the scary bits’
and the scary bits
Both Sides Now

Like a landmark, like a sodding, stupid landmark. I remember 3 years ago as clearly as if it was a few hours ago. His voice waking me. And yet, I’m in a life so totally different now that I’m completely detached from the life that came before it. Maybe I’ve looked at every photo so often that I’ve forgotten the man who is in the photo. It’s yesterday and yet it’s ancient history. I still talk to you. I still wish you ‘goodnight’.I still wish.

‘Sweating cobs‘ – strange to remember it now in the depths of a Korean winter, but some chap just said it on the radio.

In February, it will be the 3rd anniversary of Tony’s death. How long am I meant to remind myself of this awful day and when can I pretend to have forgotten it? [I am, after all, pretty shit at remembering any other date without transferring it to the new calendar each year]. Next year, I’ve agreed [with me], I won’t copy over the birthdays of Tony’s great grand-children. Is it fair to expect them in turn to remember the day their great-grandfather left this world ?

Remembering is why I started this blog in the 1st place. As I forgot things seemingly so easily when Tony was alive. HE was my memory ! I’ve written a memoire now [it’s complete I think] so that it can never be forgotten. I finished that a year ago – it was something I ‘did’ on a Saturday night – my way of continuing to share with Tony now that he was no longer breathing on the settee next to me.

But I still remember things: these are from the bathroom mirror [written with a boardmarker – it’s so useful being a teacher]. Some I’ve written here before, but better to repeat than to forget:-

Maureen Lipman and the Clouds [It’s 93/94, a summer/autumn evening and ee’re giving Tony’s dark shop, ‘Flowers and things’, a make-over, painting 70s laminate sauna-style planking with white clouds on a powder blue sky – and I’m playing on his stereo Maureen Lipman reading from one of her biogs – funny,funny woman – we laugh of course – and then, December 2012, I’m reminded of this when I’m painting a cloudy sky on a corridor wall in my new art dept as Maureen Lipman discusses her experience of her own bereavement on radio 2!]

‘Towsends and towsends‘ [It was a way he had of referring to ‘LOTS of things’]

The time I tried to wash our cream bathmat in the washing machine and we had to call a mechanic out to unblock the results – in Totton !

His ears – he refused to use cotton buds and his ears used to block/unblock every time he had a heavy cold and would need me to pour ear-drops in and stuff with cotton wool as he lay horizontally on a settee and I kissed his lovely face.

‘King Billy‘ [Tony rhyming slang for ‘chilly’ – as in ‘It’s a bit king billy’]

Pants – underpants, that is: my fat thighs are pretty merciless on knicker elastic anb it used to drive Tony potty that I therefore went through pants at quite a rate. In latter years, we solved this by colour-coding our pants – he had grey, I had black. I have, of course, worn all his underpants since his death – this has been a good way to make bereavement less awful.

‘Cheeso‘ [More rhyming slang – Tonyish for ‘wow’]

Blood spots – Tony had several on his body – large freckles – I know where they were.

Perfume and walkie talkies [with a few notable exceptions, left to his own devices, Tony wasn’t great at buying presents for his kids. He tended to buy perfume for the ‘girls’ and walkie-talkies or aftershave for the ‘boys’.]

I’ve also written ‘going home for the holidays‘ – I don’t need reminding about this. At the end of each and every term, I will always be reminded of how great it was to go home to him on the last day of term.

I can clean the bathroom mirror now and be ready for 2013.