This is my grandad, he was the guy who taught me how to build random things out of bits of wood and introduced me to the benefits of using a thumb stick when out randomly walking in the woods.
I guess out of all my family, my grandma and grandad were the the only ones that i was really close to. And i wasn’t even really that close to them to be honest. I spent a lot of time as a child in the school holidays at their cottage playing in the fields and down by this little stream that was a short walk out their back gate.
I have fond memories of me and grandad in his shed and he would let me use his tools to make something random like a box or a shelf. They were always terrible but he always said they were brill.
I remember going out in him in his car – a yellow nova sr! He would put his driving gloves on and set off to some mates of his to get some fish or into the local village centre to see a man about a dog. Ill never forget how popular and well known my grandad was around skegness, he used to cut hair back when he was in his prime, so got to know most of the families in skeg, and that filtered through over the generations till it got to the stage where everywhere we went he was saying hello to people. And skegness (and the surrounding areas) is not a small area!
We’d go to the woods and we would walk through with our thumbsticks, he was the thumbstick master! From time to time he would participate in the hunting in the local forests, and do some bush beating. He used his thumbsticks to hit the bushes to set the birds off. I didnt care about that though i just thought they were cool cos my grandad made them.
He has recently been ill due to old age, smoking 20 a day for 70+ years, and having a bad fall. He never really recovered from the first time he went in hospital a few weeks ago.
We arrived at the hospital about 5:20 after a call from my aunty M saying that he wasn’t doing well. There were a few of the family there just looking over this small figure that was my grandad. He wasn’t breathing well, and had his eyes almost shut. There was no sign of life apart from the occasional gasp for air.
His breathing slowed down, and at 6pm on the 28th March 2008 his breathing stopped.
The picture above was taken on his 86th birthday, which was on the 8th of December 2006.
One hundred and eleven days later and he’d dead 🙁
Rest in peace grandad.
You will be remembered and missed forever.
