'Tis the season to remember...

I've had a fantastic Christmas. No, I'm not boasting (well, maybe just a little bit). But it was simply lovely. Snow, mulled wine, an enormous great glistening turkey, wonderful company, lunchtime pub-visits, presents, it was a picture-postcard of how Christmas should be. All this despite the fact that Wonderful Man and I both came down with the Christmas flu bug that's been going round (a perfect excuse for a hot toddy!).

But today I'd like to remember something else. In fact, someone else. My wonderfully eccentric, slightly dotty, larger-than-life Auntie Gwen. Sadly we heard that she'd died of a heart attack early on Boxing Day morning.

It's always hard when someone dies at Christmastime - in the midst of all the celebration, the Christmas cheer, the laughter, there's a sad pause, an emptiness that doesn't dominate but still affects. As Sting rightly puts it, "there's a little black spot on the sun today...."

Auntie Gwen was a character. My first memories of her were trips down to her house on the edge of a huge valley, sitting in her large drawing room with its oil paintings of ducks, making funny shaped bread rolls with her in her oven, climbing the trees in her orchard and shaking the branches so the apples would fall, and playing with her dogs. For Auntie Gwen always had dogs. From Patsy, her horse-sized Newfoundland who I could ride on as a small child, to a huggably soft springer spaniel called Bracken (if memory serves me) to her last dog, an enormous and excitably bouncy labrador cross called Shadow. Auntie Gwen was never without a dog. Legend had it that when she'd adopted a tiny little dog (her one and only small dog) and it bit her, she bit it right back. On the nose.

We loved our visits to her house, scrambling up and down the steep banks of her wild garden, thrashing around with Patsy, fishing in the streams and then climbing the trees to crunch down mouthfuls of teeth-gratingly sharp apples. Patsy taught me one of my first lessons about animals and death - hearing a high pitched cry, I jumped over the wall to see her shaking a rabbit, floppy and broken-necked in her mouth. Rather than being repulsed, we were fascinated.

While we made free with her garden, she would sit for hours in her swinging seat with my mother, their gentle laughter drifting over to where we would be digging up worms, making dams in the stream, or simply making huge piles of shiny apples. She and my mother had a beautiful connection, ever since my mother was a child and would go and stay with Auntie Gwen on her farm. Together they would pick daffodils, feed the calves, walk along the hedgerows, go and say hello to the horses (starting a lifelong love affair with horses for my mother) and spend their days outside in the sun. My mother used to tell us her favourite story about bathtime - Auntie Gwen would station her golden retriever, Goldie, to watch over Mum in the bath. The moment she walked out of the room, Mum would call the dog, who, ever playful, would leap merrily into the bath, splashing water everywhere. When Auntie Gwen came back in with warmed towels, she would find Mum shampooing Goldie's hair, the dog sitting in the bathwater looking utterly blissful.

In later years, Auntie Gwen lived halfway up a remote welsh mountain, overlooking hills and valleys, first with another newfoundland, Bumble (approximately the size of a bear), and then with the inimitable Shadow. A little older, a little more stooped, and maybe a little more dotty, she still replied to my letters faithfully, telling me about Shadow, about the village, the weather. On one memorable occasion when I visited with my brother, she demonstrated her bath-lift to us. Fully clothed, of course but still slightly disconcerting!

Auntie Gwen was the last of the older female generation in our family. I like to think that she's happy somewhere with the rest of her family - her mother (my great-grandmother), her sister (my grandmother), her niece (my mother) and all the other strong and feisty females that make up my ancestors. Probably with a large gin and tonic in her hand.

Auntie Gwen, wherever you are...we salute you.