‘North Wind’ was a song that felt special from the beginning.  The tune was sad and haunting. When I listen to it now it still sends shivers down my spine.

One day when I was in Bob’s studio, I made up the tune for ‘North Wind’.  Bob went to get me some water and I started playing with the sound bowl.  I made up a tune.  When he came back he listened and said, “What are the words to that?”  I don’t know where the words came from.  Maybe it was because I was going to see the Snow Queen with Ina that I thought of the cold and hearts being frozen.  Bob prompted me to think of more words while he played an accompaniment on the guitar. We carried on playing and singing it and it gradually evolved. We were both pleased with it.

I took the words away with me to work on them some more, singing the song as I went for walks, and by the next time I saw Bob it was just about finished.  We sang it again and then recorded it.  Bob took it away and worked on the chords. He added the sound of strings and a sound like the wind and other mournful sounds.  Next time I came in he played it to me and I literally danced for joy and cried to hear it.  It was a real song! A song that people might listen to.

This was a song that I could share with my family and friends, a song that told part of my story to others.

It was a song about loss and bereavement, about how you feel when someone you love isn’t there any more.  It was a sad song, but it wasn’t hopeless.  There was hope in it and a sense of a journey to some sort of future.  It felt good to hear it sounding so polished.  It seemed to capture those feelings I had had when I wrote it; it held the sadness within it.  I felt a sense of achievement, of having created something.

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‘Loved by you’ is a song that I wrote to try to say thank you to M, Sharon’s husband.  He loved her and made her happy.  It was so hard for him to watch her getting more and more ill.  There’s so much that I will never know about what they went through together and what he went through after she had died.  I will always remember how well he looked after her and how happy she was with him.

I couldn’t tell him in a conversation how grateful I am to him for being so good to her and caring for her so well; we would both be too embarrassed.  So I wrote it in a song.  The song also tries to express that I am sure that Sharon would want him to be happy now.  She wouldn’t want him to be always sad and on his own.  She would want him to find a new happiness without forgetting the happiness that they had had together.

This is another song that I want other people to hear. I want them to remember how happy M and Sharon were together.

* * *

It is very important to me to be able to share memories of Sharon with other people who remember her.  Each one of us has our own memories of Sharon, so many different pictures in our minds.  Sometimes it’s hard to remember because it makes us sad.  Perhaps some people may choose to ‘let things go’, ‘put it behind them’; perhaps they are reluctant to talk about her, but I want to remember.

I wrote the song ‘Don’t forget to remember’ on Sharon’s birthday, the third birthday since she had died.  No one had mentioned to me what day it was and that seemed so strange because it felt like it should still be special, not just another day.  I went to London to meet my friend Chris. We had a lovely day and I talked a lot about Sharon and the songs.

On the Oxford Tube coming home some words and music started to come to me: ‘Am I the only one who remembers that this was a special day?’  I wanted to say something about the emptiness and isolation of birthdays and anniversaries when the person you love isn’t there any more.  I am sure now that lots of people were thinking of Sharon on that day.  It was just that we didn’t talk to each other about her.

I sang quietly into my mobile (the bus was nearly empty and there was no-one close to me) and recorded it as I thought of it.  I felt that I had remembered Sharon and celebrated her birthday by doing something special. For me, it’s important to remember all the good times, the special days and anniversaries and to mark them in some way.

I really value those times when I can talk about Sharon with someone who shares the memories. I talk to Sue, M’s mum.  I talk to my sister Sue.  We remind each other of things that happened and one memory triggers another so that sometimes we remember things that had slipped our minds; we remember, perhaps, what we said and what Sharon or M said; we can hear Sharon’s voice or her laugh as we think of those days gone by.