I am sorry to regular readers that currently the content of my blog is rather introspective but to be honest I have been finding it a useful vehicle for expressing things that sometimes I have found hard to vocalise.  I know that for many my dad's passing is now old news but for me it is still raw and sometimes I feel like someone has pushed the pause button on my life and I don't know how to get it back onto play. 

I was, unashamedly, a Daddy's girl and for nearly 30 years both John and I have done all sorts of things with both Dad and Mum in mind.  John and I were not yet married when Dad was recovering from his first heart attack and we used to go across to Keinton Mandeville on a Sunday for lunch.  John would spend ages trying to find a new bottle of red wine for Dad to sample and then when Mum and Dad moved to Cyprus we would visit as often as we could and once again John would scour the duty free for a nice little bottle of red for Dad.  Oxford Landing springs to mind - purchased at Bristol Airport and then there was the highly acclaimed Fleurie purchased at great expense one Christmas and which none of us really liked.  Dad introduced us to Othello and Statos 99 and Island Vines and eventually our favourite Agios Onoufrios - Dad would drink some terrible house wines and even worse cartons but as long as they were red he didn't seem to mind.

His birthday will never go unremembered as he shared that day with John born on the same day but 35 years apart and his passing will never go unremembered as he died on his great grandson Jack's third birthday.

He is with us wherever I look around the house and the garden, he loved coming to Droushia even though he found it cold, he insisted that we always began our Christmas Day celebrations with a trip the the Hotel, maybe it made my cooking taste better because he once declared, very loudly, that my Sunday Lunches would be ok if I just knew how to cook my vegetables properly!  Although this year I seem to remember he said I got his Brussels just right. 

What I must keep reminding myself is that, over the course of the past 7 years when we would have seen Mum and Dad on average three times a week and then sometimes more over Christmas and New Year when they stayed over, John and I enjoyed over a thousand days of his company on the island that he loved - we did so much together and the vision I have of him sitting on a village bus swigging wine out of the bottle en route to John's 50th birthday party will stay with me forever - he enjoyed life to the full and to the end.