Remembering Andrew - Our Eulogy

[Music] do [Music] welcome to fruity knitting i'm andrea and i'm madeline so if you're new to fruity knitting and you're checking it out for the first time we have an archive of 111 episodes featuring really fantastic guests and and really good knitting content for you to look through and explore this is not a normal episode this is going to be a very special memorial video that madeleine and i wanted to do because andrew passed away last month on the 15th of april and in many ways this is an extremely hard video for both madeleine and i to do but we both really appreciate that over the last five years that andrew and i have been doing fruity knitting many of you have really grown to love him not just because of his enormous contribution to fruity knitting but i think even more particularly because of his personality which has really shone through and so we both recognize that andrew's death has also left many of our patrons and some of our viewers feeling really really sad and so today we would just like to share some memories and some photos with you and we hope that gives you joy but we also really want to honor andrew mumma and i went through old photos together and we picked those out that we think go well with some of the memories we want to share with you today so this video is our eulogy to dad yeah but before we get on and and share some happy memories and some old photos i just want to talk just a little bit from a very personal note and that is that it's really impossible for me to express the depth of loss that i feel with andrew gone it's such an intimate loss that i can't even begin to explain or share except to say that andrew really was the center of my life he was the center of our whole family and there's nothing on this earth that i love that's not intimately connected to him and i've actually been reading c.s lewis's book a grief observed and where he describes his own grief when his own wife died also from cancer and it's a really quite remarkable book and i found that so many of my sort of foggy thoughts were so beautifully and eloquently articulated in this book and that's given me quite a lot of clarity which is really great and if i can remember to quote him correctly what he wrote one of the things that he wrote when his wife died was that the act of living is different all through her absence is like the sky spread all over everything and that is exactly how i feel because everything that i love and everything that has a lot of meaning to me is so intimately connected to andrew and i now it all has a sense of pain added to it because i'm just reminded that i can't share it with him obviously there's so many activities and places and people on this earth that give us joy and satisfaction and pleasure but you do just get such a deeper level of joy when you're able to share that pleasure with the person that you really really love and so now even now when i just i'm trying to give myself some solace or some comfort and i go to and try to do an activity or do something that gave me joy in the past it it now has pain because it just reminds me of andrew's absence so his absence really does feel like it's it's spread all over my life and another aspect of grief that c.s lewis writes about is how your images and your your memories compare to reality so how can you be sure that the image and memory that you have of the person actually is in fact true to that person and he writes that over a period of months and unfortunately i've i found this just even over a period of weeks that because you want to keep that person really close to you you're thinking about them all the time and you now only have a finite set of memories and as you just keep reworking these memories they eventually become memories of memories and they're all self-selected memories anyway and they will have your own personal bias even if it's a subconscious bias and the real person's not there to contradict the memories or to keep them fresh and relevant because no matter how well you think you know somebody they will evolve over time and they'll also just prove you wrong by behaving or thinking or saying something that was completely unexpected so the fear is that when people say to you he'll live on in your memories that's exactly what he won't do because over time as you do keep reworking these memories the memories themselves become more like a caricature or more two-dimensional and so you you still feel that person slipping from you even on a mental level and so the harsh reality is that you just can't stop death even even mentally and that's that's something that another thing you just have to get used to and that i'm just discovering and getting used to and that's that's pretty hard for me one of the the greatest things was being able to the great things about marriage is being able to share your whole adult life and walk side by side with somebody and just watch them and intimately intimately experience how they evolve and develop over time and get to share those experiences with them over over your whole adult life that's something you only get with time you can't get it any other way and it's a beautiful thing for me we were together for 25 years and married for 23 years i would love to be married to him for 50 years so it feels like a great loss to me not to be able to grow old with him and and even particularly the last six months was such an intense experience for us for both of us everything happened so rapidly from what looked like a really healthy vibrant person to dying that's that's so quick for that to happen in six months and that time together was very intense for us i was with him literally every hour i was looking after him physically we were both looking after each other emotionally and spiritually and you just can't go through an experience like that without it deeply deeply profoundly changing you and i felt like we both through that experience just got this deeper level of maturity individually and then in our our relationship and i would love to speak to him about that right now and i would love to be able to have the joy of experiencing that added depth of maturity in our relationship over the next few years but that's that's just unfortunately we can't have that but just i don't want to get too teary on you just another memory that i i another thought is back when andrew was alive and we were at the cancer clinic our room had a really beautiful window and i would spend quite a lot of time all the window wasn't beautiful but the view was i would have i spent a lot of time looking out at this at this view and i can remember once just feeling such intense agony and thinking that right now at that very moment that i was feeling this millions of people all around the world were experienced the same intense pain and agony and it was just so hard for me to fathom how it could be possible to experience something that was so deeply personal and deeply painful but that experience could at the same time be so incredibly common and that's just one of the mysteries of life um yeah unexplainable mystery of life anyway i didn't mean to get too heavy on you so i do think we should move on and talk about some happy happy memories and and show some photos so why don't you you start okay um well mom you always say that an important criterion for choosing a husband is to find someone who will center his life around his family and that you saw that in that i'm really grateful for that because dad was very invested in being a good father to me he was also a very encouraging person and great at giving praise which was a great comfort to both of us and looking back i'm just grateful for the whole time that he invested in doing fun activities with me for example when i was very little we would frequently build these lego towers together that would go from the floor and reach right up to the ceiling but we'd also play board games or do jigsaw puzzles as a family and after mum showed him how to he actually started to help me with my flute and piano practice on the weekends as well as helping me with my maths and latin homework in high school that had always done very well academically throughout school and university so when i went into high school dad decided he would give me some coaching on how to better prepare for my exams because he was always very good at that he was good at figuring out what was most likely to be asked in an exam and also how to use your study time most efficiently yeah and he would try to teach me how to answer my questions more systematically uh because i tended to overlook something and then do silly little mistakes and lose points yeah but sometimes i would get impatient with him and he'd say just sit down madeline and listen to what i have to say because i'm a pretty clever guy it's true he's a very clever guy and he did really well he just knew how to do exams really well yeah so it was a great skill that for him to teach you yeah um but it did sort of turn into a family joke that whenever dad you know he was serious about something trying to explain something you'll make a point one of us would add you should really listen to him because he's a pretty clever guy you know yeah [Laughter] it that didn't go sit down so well with him right but he he could laugh along sometimes yeah anyway i really want to show you this photo i love it this is us at the aspar farm during one of our holidays we started to go here when i was four years old about twice a year and continued that tradition for many many years afterwards and those holidays were so great especially as a kid because you could just roam free all day and play with the cows or in the fields and that was great because he would sometimes take the time to do rough and tumble games with me or go you know play catch on the hay balls and we just jump from one hay bale to the next yeah so that could be very playful they were really great holidays yeah that's when i would often sing like i would be learning new repertoire and there was a great big cow shed there so i would sing there and andrew was often doing extra study so and you could run around however you wanted your mum's singing with echo over the valleys with an occasional move from a cow yeah but after that we had about four five years roughly we had a tradition of spending our family holiday over christmas and island that was before we had jack because when we got jack we unfortunately couldn't take him with us to ireland but we started to go to snowdonia and wales instead but before that we would spend every christmas in on the west coast of ireland close to a little town called dingle mum was great you organized all of our holidays and you picked dingle because of the stunning landscape around there that you can go hiking in but at the same time dingle is a center for irish folk music and mum being a singer she loved to sing with other pub musicians there yeah that was heaps of fun yeah yeah so we would be hiking in this gorgeous landscape during the day and then in the evenings we'd go to a really cozy pub and i'd often sing and so it was fantastic holidays i listened to live music yeah yeah um and yeah it was in those pubs that that actually showed me how to build a tower out of beer coasters for the first time and i got completely hooked so whenever we went to a pub i had to build these beer coaster towers and unfortunately i can't find a picture with dad in it because back then he was generally behind the camera yeah but as you can see irish pubs are very family friendly they were great really great holidays in ireland there's also another tradition called the christmas swim it's on the 25th of december and dad and i would take part in it every single year that we were there but it was too cold for mum so she would be standing on the beach and waiting for us with towels and cardboard boxes to stand on so we could get dried and dressed as quick as possible because it was really cold and the organizers of the swim had this long table of goodies with hot tea and gin and mince pies to munch on for the swimmers afterwards it was a pretty crazy time because it's not a real swim you'd have to call it the christmas dip yeah the people stand there it's really really freezing the sea is completely freezing and then all together probably i don't know 30 or 50 people maybe even more they would all rush into the sea some of them would be brave and hang around for a bit longer but most just kind of dip down maybe only up to their heads like didn't even put their heads in and then came screaming and running back yeah but it made your whole body really tingle and it was just kind of a fun crazy thing to do and it made you feel like you really earned your christmas dinner absolutely yeah at the end so it was mad but a lot of fun but the landscape around the dingle peninsula is really spectacular and that's also where we started doing timed family photos often on the edge of cliffs so andrew would set up the camera and the camera would be perched precariously against a rock somewhere and the wind in ireland is always blowing wildly and then he'd give us instructions on exactly where we should sit to make a really great good photo then he'd set the timer and run back into position for the family photo and this was often a bit scary because we were often perched somewhere fairly dangerous and we we actually managed to get some really fantastic family photos this way and we just continued that family tradition as you got older and and also in snowdonia so this is a complete change of topic but i wanted to show you this one photo of dad and i went wearing matching t-shirts that i bought us in australia because he just loved to wear the groovy t-shirts that mum and i got him yeah he was a really great dad and he did really enjoy wearing dad and daughter matchy-matchy matchy t-shirt [Laughter] yeah i mean i remember when i was in my last couple of months being pregnant with madeleine that andrew was so excited to finally get to meet madeleine and see what her personality was like and he just couldn't wait to do all of the parenting things with her so much so that some of the activities they were doing were quite age inappropriate for example when madeleine was a newborn like all newborns she couldn't focus on your face unless it was 20 or 30 centimeters away from her own face and andrew of course knew this but he insisted anyway on playing peek-a-boo with her from around the corner and it just looks so funny because he's trying to engage here and madeleine's lying on her back as a newborn with this sort of cross-eyed expression on her face and then also when madeleine was four or five years old andrew started reading all the narnia books to her and these books i think are appropriate for maybe an eight to ten year old at the earliest i think what had happened is andrew had already read all of the young children's classical literature out aloud to her and he was just wanting to get onto some more substantial or stimulating reading for himself so in the evenings madeleine would be skipping around her bedroom and andrew would just be sitting there reading chapter after chapter of the narnia books and i'd come in to check up on them and i was a bit suspicious and i'd say to madeleine are you really listening to this and she'd be going yes yes keep reading keep reading and occasionally i thought oh look i think this is a racket i'm just going to test you so i said okay summarize summarize what's just happened and you're able to do it well enough for me not to put a stop to it i always paid attention i just had to move around a lot yeah yeah anyway i think essentially what you were thinking was that as long as you kept dad reading you wouldn't have to go to bed and he fell into that trap that was good at reading out books yeah he read he read a lot of stuff to you he was great so we haven't been going through his life chronologically so i think we should go back now and i should show you some funny photos of him in early childhood and the time before we met so here he is a very cute happy boy probably really giggly as a little boy i think andrew had a very happy and sheltered childhood he grew up in melbourne his own father was 50 when andrew was born he was a physician and a road scholar and his mother studied music at the melbourne conservatorium and later became a teacher and i think just like many australian kids andrews best childhood memories were playing on the beach or bush walking or going on family camping trips but from a really early age andrew completely loved riding his bike in fact andrew and i almost met when we were both 18. we eventually met when we were 26 but when we were 18 and 19 both of us actually had or went through separately a hippie stage so i was studying music in adelaide at that time and he was in melbourne studying and he was always looking for excuses to do completely crazy long bike roads rides but so i think around when he was 18 or 19 he actually took a year off i think in his second year at uni he took that year off and because he wanted to manage this vegetarian restaurant that was part of monash university and so he got it in his head that he was going to ride his bike from melbourne to adelaide which is a distance of about 800 kilometers and a good portion of that ride is through desert which can easily get up to 43 degrees celsius so he had the idea to ride his bike from melbourne to adelaide because there was a vegetarian restaurant in adelaide that was run by a commune and he wanted to go there and just pick up some ideas on how it was it was managed and runs because he thought he could implement those ideas back into the restaurant that was at monash university so that was his excuse for doing this crazy trip anyway this restaurant i would go to in adelaide i would go to almost on a daily basis i think originally it was run by the hari krishnas and they would make this fantastic indian food or vegetarian indian food and as students we could go there and eat as much as we like for two or three dollars so i'd be going there almost on a daily basis and andrew also stayed with some hippie friends of mine in the adelaide hills but we just despite all of that possible contact we just passed each other and didn't get to meet then but so that's an example of one crazy bike ride that he did and and then later when he was 19 years old he packed up his bike in the summer holidays in the summer uni holidays and flew to india with almost no plans or preparation so once he got off the plane it was he got off the plane in what was then bombay he found out from a tourist guide that there was actually a war on in the northern part of india so he thought okay well then i'll ride down the southern part so he jumped on his bike and at that time there was miles and miles of slums all around the airport so he had to ride through all of those and then he spent almost two months riding around southern india and he'd just ride from village to village and sleep wherever he could and you have to remember that back then this was around 19 1991 or 1990 there was no cell phones so and he could only ever phone his parents when he came across a public phone booth that actually worked in this remote parts of india so i'm just amazed that his parents didn't completely freak out like i would have freaked out if you wanted to do something i know and i think it's so crazy when i hear about all the nutty things you guys said when you were young and how you try to protect me and warm me not to do those things i think that's a typical parent move yeah well we did do some pretty crazy things but i think i don't know you always look back on history and you think that it was safer then than it is now somehow so he did that crazy crazy um ride all around india but then also when i did get to know him in melbourne he did a he would regularly do the melbourne round the bay ride which is a 300 kilometer ride in one day that it's just only crazy bikey people do it and it's right around the melbourne peninsula and then later when we moved to germany he also rode his bike from frankfurt to zurich which took him three days he did that with some work colleagues so he has always been into doing crazy bike rides yeah okay but i want to show you a couple more funny photos of andrew during his hippie stage i love this photo he would used to go to folk festival folk music festivals and this is a photo from that era and then this photo i also really love it's andrew with his student housemates in their backyard and i love it because it looks like an album cover for an early australian rock band it's so groovy they do it's just a crazy haphazard photo but just the way they're all standing looks so cool so that brings me to the age of 26 when we finally did meet i'd moved to melbourne and at that time andrew was working as a computer programmer but in his holidays he'd love to study languages just for fun so we met at melbourne university doing a really intensive study course together so this course was first year german it was the workload of first year german condensed into six weeks so what you would normally have to cover in one week you had to go through and cover in one day and every evening you had about three or four hours homework so it was incredibly intensive there was 17 students and it sort of took place over the summer holidays and it was a chance for people to make up a subject if they had if they wanted to complete their bachelor's early or something like that anyway if you got in they said to you you had to block off this six weeks this six week period and do nothing else in your life so the whole 17 of us got to know each other really well and it was during this time that andrew first asked me out he asked me out to the premiere of babe the pig film back then and i turned him down because i had to study and he did understand this he was very academic as we've already said he had an excellent education private boys school jesuit priests and had done years and years of latin my education was very spartan and at the time then i i knew that an adjective described a noun and an adverb described a verb i could point out a preposition and a conjunction but that was it so i had to madly madly study where he didn't have to study that much at all and so when he when i turned him down he just didn't understand it he thought i didn't want to go out with him but i have to i have to just boast about him a little bit since he's not here but when we finished that course he got top of the class but he got top of the class by about 20 points like his mark was here 20 points lower was the next person like he was just pretty clever unbelievable significantly good [Laughter] yeah anyway so here's a photo of both of us around that time and i think i fell in love with his dark curly hair because i have a real thing for curly hair and we got serious pretty quickly and then about two years later we were married and madeleine was on the way and then when madeleine was about one year old we moved to germany and we started our new adventure so that's something that i can definitely say about andrew he was always up to starting a new adventure so quite often if i had an idea of doing something really fun and i'd invite him to do it with me he would just be totally fine to jump in with no qualms so we would often start a a hobby together fairly relaxed and then pretty soon because of both of our personalities we'd get serious about it and start getting really intense and a good example of that is with dancing and i have mentioned this briefly on a past episode so i won't part of it i won't go into too much detail but we first started dancing when six weeks before our wedding i suggested to him that we learned to do a wedding tango instead of a wedding waltz and he thought okay let's do that so we hired a private dance instructor who was very excited about choreographing our own individual tango for us so we'd go to weekly lessons and but every week he would just expand on the choreography and give us more and more elaborate steps to do and we were complete beginners so it meant that we really had to practice but we were living in a very tiny apartment with no floor space that was available to practice in but our apartment was very close to the melbourne cemetery that was the only space we had that we could practice on and we needed to practice almost on a daily basis so every evening when it was dark or getting dark we'd kind of sneak down there and practice our tango steps hoping we wouldn't freak people out see if they came across us and think what's a t why are they dancing a tango in a cemetery but i love the fact that he would just do stupid things like this with me without worrying about it like that was just a lot of fun yeah we did do our tango pretty well i think in the end and i have shown some footage of our tango in a much earlier episode but it's only a couple of minutes so i'll pop it in here as well just in a minute for you to have a look at but um we were most nervous about this tango than anything else in the ceremony that's all our attention was can we get through this tango and remember it but after the wedding we didn't do any more dancing because madeleine came along and there's just no time with a newborn to do dancing and then we moved to germany and it was about 10 or 12 years later that i had the idea let's let's just go and take some ballroom dancing because that's a really german thing to do here isn't it it is like actually as a student in high school we started at around 14 years of age yeah most of the people in my class they did those classes yeah it's a really dancing class it's a great thing for kids to to learn to do and anyway so we started that in a pretty relaxed fashion and then pretty soon we're going to dance classes three nights a week and we started doing exams because that always gives you a goal to work on and then in the end we ended up doing our gold star in ballroom dancing which meant that we had to be examined on 12 different dance styles and so once we achieved that somehow our life just changed and we dropped that and moved on to something else unfortunately i don't have any footage or photos to show you of our ballroom dancing period but here's a photo of us celebrating our joint 40th birthday party and the theme of this birthday party was the roaring 40s so everybody who came had to dress up in the 40s style clothes and then we gave them a performance of all of our jive steps which was a ton of fun so on the right you can see a photo of a birthday cake that a friend of ours made for us i think it's a great cake and it's just a picture of both of us dancing on it coming up now is just a couple of minutes of our wedding tango footage which we did 23 years ago [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] uh while andrew and i were in the cancer clinic andrew's sister emailed me a whole bunch of letters that andrew's grandfather had written to andrew's father back in 1943. if that sounds like a long time ago just remember that andrew's father was 50 when andrew was born but andrew's grandfather was a really extraordinary man and i just want to briefly talk about him now for a few reasons firstly these letters are fresh in my mind and i love history particularly family history but andrew looked really remarkably like his grandfather it's quite uncanny and they shared some similar personality traits and also sadly andrew's grandfather died very suddenly in his 50s leaving his family feeling very bereft so here's a picture of him his name was keith mckedi doig and you can see that he does look a lot like andrew he was a really brilliant man academically but he was also a really top sportsman so he was the captain of the melbourne university football team and the captain of the melbourne uni cricket team and he studied medicine and was a physician in the first world war in france on the western front and he was in the famous battle of the somme and it was there that he was awarded the military cross for his bravery working on the front line in the trenches helping injured soldiers and then later after the first world war he came back to australia and he set up the very first private hospital in victoria so i'd known the facts that keith mcketti deut was this remarkably talented man who massively over achieved in his lifetime but i had no idea what his personality was going to be like until i read these letters and so i did get to let read a couple of the letters out to andrew but he was very sick at the time and his concentration wasn't strong so i'm very sad that i couldn't end up reading the whole lot to him because he would have loved to get to know his grandfather in the same way that i really love to get to know him through reading these letters so keith mckedi doig would write a letter to each of his four children on a weekly basis and we have all of the letters that he wrote to andrew's father in the year of 1943 and in 1943 ron was a medical student also at melbourne university and the age difference between keith who is the far the grandfather and ron who's who's andrew's father is the same as the age difference between andrew and madeline right now which is just a funny coincidence anyway these letters are so enlightening to me because so much of his character comes through and he was such a loving kind intelligent generous man who obviously had the family as the center of his life that just comes through so much and it just reminds me of andrew i read these letters and i just keep seeing andrew through it so i mean this andrew's grandfather achieved massive amounts sort of like he was really an extraordinary person but it's unusual to have that but also such a beautiful personality at the same time family orientated yeah but just a caring person he was actually reading more about him he was really well respected by a lot of people but yeah it's interesting to see that he really enjoyed his family life loved his kids loved his family loved his wife loved the dog and all the homely activities and these letters are beautiful to read they're really well written they're witty and intelligent but they start off they usually start off with something homely and rambling about family activities and how his wife loves to go plain spotting you have to remember in 1943 there's not many planes in the sky and so she goes out early in the morning i think trying to spot them usually comes back with with no results and how the the beloved dog binky tags along behind her so it starts off with some kind of family news then it goes straight into discussing a really interesting medical case that he had to deal with at the hospital that week and so the first letter i picked up he talks about a woman who'd just given birth and had an acute inversion of the uterus which happens once in 30 000 cases apparently and so he writes what happens and then he tells ron this is exactly what you should do and what you shouldn't do if you ever come across a case like this so every letter there's some kind of medical case that's written and he's teaching and coaching ron how to be inquiring and and what to look out for and not how not to make silly mistakes here and sometimes he would even just write up a case and say so ron what would your diagnosis be and what would your recommendation of treatment be so his concept it's amazing that the kind of support encouraging and nurturing that he gives ron on a weekly basis and what's also i think these letters have been fascinating to read from a medical student standpoint because it's medicine in the 1943 okay and if you think penicillin i think was first used on humans in 1942 so they're dealing with medical issues that we have today trying to find their way with it so it's fascinating reading and he writes so well yeah so it's just a great read and then at the end of the letters he will he will end with some kind of beautiful loving coaching advice on how to handle his studies or his exams or difficult lecturers or even advice on as a physician on how to approach his his own patients so i just want to read out a couple of excerpts for you so and maybe you can understand what i mean by his personality coming through so the the first couple of excerpts i've i've put down together i think ron must have started doing some intensive care kind of work so he writes in one letter it'll take a day or two for you to settle in and become used to seeing the accidents in the raw but take it all and remember if you feel it all squeamish that it does not add to efficiency and that you have to squash that feeling so that you can do the best work for the sick and suffering whom you're called upon to treat it's perhaps hard at first but you can overcome it without losing the sympathy that you must always feel for those who are suffering so i'm really touched that these are very personal letters just father to son and he's coaching him not only on on academic things but also moral things in a way and in another letter he writes concentrate on the job in hand and while you're there seek out those little practical hints in procedure that make all the difference between a thing well done and a thing done poorly further do not be worried too much if at first you're slow in some practical matters this is good advice for us knitters a technique is worth striving for and you have to crawl before you walk speed is all right when it's an accomplishment it is all wrong when it becomes an aim refuse to be rattled and let the main consideration be the well-being of your patient even if he is a drunk or an outcast and just one more example of the gentle advice that he's giving ron it's time to do all the little extra things now and endeavor to argue your way into all sorts of discussions on medical and surgical problems and as i've told you become quietly confident in your approaches to your patients and clinicians let all your actions be purposeful and thought out beforehand so i just love that sounds like great advice no but it reminds me of andrew because andrew would be always giving you this kind of gentle encouragement advice and even me throughout my you know working in things and different projects when i was performing and things andrew would give me a lot of good encouraging loving advice yeah yeah yeah that's he wasn't like overbearing when he gave it he was always kind and gentle like you said and encouraging and every letter is always signed off with cheerio lady and that's just really an old quaint australian expression love and good wishes mum and dad so i i just find that so charming and i also find it really charming how binky the dog just features in every lecture i like our jack yeah i i've got to find out what kind of what breed of dog he was because you kind of grow to really like him and his keith is often describing his um all the little homely things around the house and and um it just again reminds me of andrew so here's a here's a little excerpt that i'll read out so he says in one of the letters he writes mum and binky are both well and both are very busy with their respective duties mum either fixing a sweater for you or a dress for gene while binky has to keep guard and watch on the house with particular attention paid to the wheelbarrow which at any time might be up to some nefarious business so i just it's just good writing and it's just writing these letters every week on a typewrite as well which if you want to recommend written hand typed yeah yeah so you can tell that these letters are i'm really enthusiastic about them because they're so fresh in my mind but it's just i just both he and andrew are such classy men and i can see where andrew sort of either inherited it or learnt it whatever but that you know i can just see so many similar personality traits and and how both of them just love their family so much and how tragic tragic it is that we're both you know both families have lost the person who was the center of their life yeah but um he was very very good at seeing andrew was very good at seeing the best in people because it doesn't take any talent to criticize people and point out people's flaws that's a very easy thing to do but it takes a lot more talent to ignore that and to try to hone in and focus only on in on positive things and that's something that i wasn't very good at and he taught me a lot to do that through his influence so to the level that i do do it it's andrew's influence [Laughter] yeah mum and i both want to say a big thank you to all of you for your heartfelt messages that you wrote us both during dad's illness and after he passed away that he was a fairly shy and unassuming man so he was completely amazed at the amount of love you guys sent him from all around the world so we are just very grateful for you for just writing down your appreciation of him and his personality which was awesome uh so generously in your messages yes thank you andrew did do a lot of different things in his life but he was particularly proud of doing fruity knitting he loved it he was so happy when he could stop his work and work on fruity knitting full time with me it it was something that it was challenging for him but he loved doing something that was different and challenging for him and he had so many plans and ideas of how to develop routine eating in the future and he was very excited about it and thrilled about the communication that he had with all of you so thank you so much for encouraging him and making him happy i'm very grateful to you all for doing that yeah so i've organized a memorial service for andrew it's going to be on may 29th of may it's a saturday at 11 a.m in germantime for our wedding we had a a concert pretty much it was a concert and i know that andrew would like a concert for his memorial service so i've organised that mum's great that way his um he played violin himself to a fairly high level in high school so i've got a professional violinist two singers and a harpist and they're going to perform what i think is a fantastic program some of the pieces of music you'll recognize because we've used them throughout our episodes and we're trying to make it that we can record it with really good quality qual audio and video and live stream it straight onto youtube at that time so the time is really good for europeans and australians it's not so good for americans and canadians but you can watch it later it's at 11 o'clock german time in the morning but if we don't manage to stream it live i will edit it and put it up on youtube later so that you can join in so it's going to be a program of great music some poems and some prayers yeah so that's coming up now we are working on an another episode which will come out sometime after that it has been madeline's going to join me for that and there's a really great interview that i know you're going to love that's part of that episode that's upcoming it's been i haven't been able to do any work on content for fruity knitting up to now it's been extremely difficult just to get through one day at a time and it's been very hard to get to the point to be able to do this memorial video but i want to deeply thank all of our loyal patient patrons who have been sticking with us through this really terrible time and giving us your your support your financial support which has been absolutely crucial for us and also the moral support and the moral support we are so deeply grateful that you have just stayed with us it's was so important it is our income and it is my income now even though i just want to go and sit in the hole i have to keep going with fruity knitting because it is my income and i have to pay the bills i hope that over time joy will come back into my heart but i'm not actually finding joy in much at the moment but i i thank you so much for your support so right now is i'm gonna insert right at the end two uh extreme knitting excerpts of the two places where andrew and i loved spending time together and that's snowdonia and shetland so thank you for spending time with both madeleine and i today and we'll say goodbye now goodbye enjoy the footage bye thank you for spending time with us again and we'll see you in two weeks yep thanks for being with us bye bye you stole my fingers do you want me to say it again no bloody hell no well i hope that's okay let's get it thumbnail picture here on the shoulder so that's coming up we're also giving you updates on our new projects and andrea's teaching me the flicking technique so i've got a short tutorial on that as well hello god i was good welcome to fruity knitting welcome to fruity knitting welcome you should practice that first word again welcome to fruity knitting that was nature take it go on take a breath welcome to fruity knitting it's a hard word to say it's not okay what is that on my videos welcome to fruity knitting this is episode 105 i'm andrew and i'm andrea huger you can't say cute bottom that's rude come on we've got to get going we've got so much to do so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] hey [Music] hey [Music] [Applause] hey [Music] so [Music] hmm [Music] bye [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: Fruity Knitting

Views: 137,838

Rating: 4.9723959 out of 5

Keywords: Knitting

Id: ym5yKrSV51I

Length: 57min 39sec (3459 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021