The thing about Sue...

The thing about Sue was that she cared. A lot. About everyone and everything. All she wanted to do was help in any way she could. She would ask how I was doing and then listen with genuine interest and concern.

The thing about Sue was that she never wanted to be the centre of attention but she always spoke her mind. She used to tell Nick and me off and I would feel as if we were a pair of naughty boys – I was scared of her! But in fairness, we gave her plenty of cause to tell us off and she always only had our best interests at heart.

The thing about Sue was her wonderful Sunday lunches – roast chicken, roast potatoes and sweet potatoes, carrots, broccoli, peas, parsnips, Yorkshire puddings, gravy. And after lunch she and I would have a long chat about what was happening in the world while Nick snaffled a cheeky bottle of wine into the studio for our afternoon sustenance...

The thing about Sue was that she ‘completed’ Nick. This is a well-worn phrase that people often use in the honeymoon period of a relationship and it wears off after a while. Not so in Sue and Nick’s case, however. They completed each other and made each other whole. She was Nick’s common sense (because he doesn’t have any of his own).

The thing about Sue was that she was immensely and fiercely proud of Nick and Jamie.

The thing about Sue was that she should have had a clipboard:

“Spend a week at Centerparcs with us,” said Nick and Sue.

I stuffed the car full of children, bags, and anything else that got in my way, and we set off for Longleat Forest. At the back of my mind I knew we could probably get through the week with a couple of changes of clothing each, some milk, tea and bread. But, as it was, the kids could hardly breathe, they were so tightly packed in with all the bags, cases and boxes of shit we thought we ought to bring, ‘just in case’. Five (yes, FIVE) tortuous, shouty, near-death experience-filled hours later our creaking and over-laden car disgorged its five thoroughly miserable passengers (although, to be fair, Jack could well have been ecstatically happy – the monosyllabic grunts, tuts, scowls and eye-rolling he uses for communication make it hard to tell).
We just have time for half a lung-full of fresh pine-scented air before being bombarded by Nick, bounding up like a big old St. Bernard on crystal meth, accompanied by a litany of orders and directions from Sue, including a sub-list of instructions as to exactly how to do what she tells us.

Unloaded, unpacked and ensconced in our shared villa (will two toilets be enough?) a stiff lie-down is called for, or perhaps taking some beer into a nice quiet corner and making sure no one interrupts it. Apparently not. Sue has an itinerary. There are things that need to be seen and done. Nick will give us a guided tour of all the activities she has pre-booked for us, in the order in which she has pre-booked them, while she tells us what time we are scheduled to start each activity, and how many minutes we have to get from one to the next...

In the morning I awake to the sound of Nick and Sue rowing. Nick and Sue row. A lot. In fact they seem to thrive on it and have turned it into an art form. Sometimes they take a break in the middle of a row to have a row about something else before picking up the original row where they left off. They row about very little things – tiny, atomic particle-sized things that no one would notice if they weren’t rowing about them. If the row starts to lose momentum, if perhaps, they realise they are rowing about something that doesn’t matter, they will skillfully shift the focus of the row and create a new sub-row which swirls around, alongside and within the parent row, allowing the intensity to increase once again. And so the original row is carried along, maintained and sustained by its offspring of mini-rows, like the flow of water through a mountain stream pushed seawards by countless eddies and currents...

Sue is berating Nick for putting an opened pack of those half-baked-finish-them-off-yourself-we-couldn’t-be-arsed baguettes in the fridge (he didn’t, I did) and putting a bottle of ketchup and jar of mustard in the cupboard rather than the fridge (he didn’t, I did). He explains that he didn’t put anything anywhere. She briefly starts a mini-row based on him never putting anything anywhere, but this is quickly parked and replaced with a much more sustainable row about whether or not he is now glaring at her...

What will we do without her? Who will tell us off? Well, we will carry on because we have to carry on but there will be a hole in the world, a missing piece. We will find a way to work around it because that’s what people do, put an arm round Nick and Jamie when they need it, carry her memory with us in our hearts, think of her and smile – she is gone but she will never be forgotten. But there will be a hole – someone here is missing...

The thing about Sue was that she was kind, generous, intelligent, funny, helpful and generally quite amazing, and I will miss her.