A-tribute-to-Rosie

Without Rosie this website would never have happened. All the writings in it are Rosie's diaries of our travels. She was a dedicated diarist, often writing the diaries late at night often after a few tipples! There is no way that I could ever have done that. In the past she did it each day from memory - in fact she wrote a whole 3 week diary from a few notes in 1973 (not on here) when Simon was a baby. In recent years she made notes during the day as we went along but it was still a task to transform it into a readable diary. This as you all know was interspersed with photos, which were few early on, when you had to pay for developing expensive roll film or slides to more recently with digital photos when we may have taken 2000 pictures on a 2 month travel. Inevitably there were many pictures of Rosie, so I thought it would be a fitting tribute to her to put a selection them of her life on here. I have some 9000 photos of her (many before I met her in 1964) but as Tommy Steele says in Half a Sixpence -

‘And what went on, we only know from the snaps he took at the time’

so they represent only particular moments in her 77 year life.

Even then cutting them down to a manageable number has meant a lot of decisions and tears. I had tried to restrict it to no more than 30 photos per year. Fortunately in her early years the number of photos was very restricted but in later years I have struggled to achive that and have ended up with 1300 photos as I have so many memorable photos of Rosie. I have divided them up into groups so you don't have to look at them all at once - or not at all if you don't want to!

I hope that for all of you who knew Rosie, some of these photos will bring back memories and to others the photos will ‘fill in gaps’ of her life with you.

I have also added extracts from the wonderful things you wrote to me on cards and emails about your memories of Rosie.

I have added the Order of Service and the words of the Funeral Service itself written by our celebrant Louise Joplin who made Rosie's funeral so memorable and now there is the video of the funeral service itself. It is just over 1 hour long.