Firstly, you have my sympathies on your mum, and I can quite believe you will always be thankful for the viceo camera.

OK, a couple of memories:

• When I was about 3 or 4, my mum decided it would be fun for me to make a tape of me singing nursery rhymes for my dad (I was a renowned nursery rhyme singer in those days). My first words into the mic were “Daddy, can you hear me?” I also liked to start fairy tales (yes, I was a singer/storyteller in my early years) with the phrase “Aponce a time…”, thus beginning my love of making words up :-) In fact, I wonder if that tape still exists? My brother and I are about to start going through a lot of her things (we put a lot of mementos and such in storage), so I will be keeping an eye out for tapes now.

• Another one is of us laughing really, really hard when she was telling me the story of my then 4-year-old aunt talking to and offering fish fingers to the clothes poles in their back garden.

Hmm. I guess those stories may go someway toward explaining my twisted sense of humour and sometimes skew-whiff behaviour!