Before I say a few words about Anne could I just make a small request. After the service would all attendees from Anglia Ruskin University kindly refrain from tossing floral tributes in the air in order to avoid injury to fellow attendees.
Immediately the story broke nationally about the mortarboards last week I felt an immediate sense of loss. Were Anne to have been there at her busy Inbox I would have sent her a similar message, she would have immediately got into gear and there would have been a dozen or so messages flying back and forth ultimately labouring the point but wringing out every last drip of humour. That was what she was like and I am equally guilty of this character flaw, as many see it.
Back in May 2004 I was pottering around on the Friends Reunited website looking for kindred spirits to share the empty hours with. I came across a profile without the usual 10 year old picture at a wedding with the ex-husband removed, just the location Chelmsford and the message “you will have to contact me to see what I have to offer”. It was quite intriguing, I had a few other irons in the fire at the time so held off to avoid complexity, then a couple of days letter I got a message from Annie2004, her, to Tarquin The Otter, me saying hello. So I replied with the usual sleepless in Great Totham, odd sense of humour, own teeth looking for somebody who isn’t bland, or something along those lines. Oh, and I have two daschshunds.
Back came the reply “You are never going to believe this - not in a million years - hold onto your bootstraps! I live in Chelmsford with my two daschunds - miniture wire haired!!! Hence Dolly and Basil! Honest - I'm not lying! - just to prove it a piccy of me with Basil”
I must admit to having been concerned that she didn’t spell miniature or dachshunds correctly but equally I knew that dachshunds are very fussy about who owns them so there must be some good in this woman and the picture of her in the now legendary orange T shirt showed a woman with a lot of love in her face, towards Basil at least.
In response to another message querying her position on heredity versus environment, the use of fog lights in broad daylight and other aspects of the human condition Anne wrote “as for bland - it's not a word usually used to describe me! - although I know what you mean, the profiles are all similar - we're all young for our age, kind, sensitive etc........”
Despite a pathological hatred of phoning strangers I did the dirty deed and had a lovely, long conversation with Anne where we discovered we had a great number of common interests and attitudes, despite her tendency to interrupt me mid-anecdote on a frequent basis. She sounded, on first hearing, very like Hyacinth Bucket heightened greatly by her calling out to Richard over some misdemeanour involving use of the garden hose, however notwithstanding we arranged a hot first date walking our respective braces of dachshunds in Danbury Lakes from the secret, free parking spot at the lower end, a lady after my own heart. And so began 4 years that changed my life.
As you approach 50 you are expected to settle down, buy a Nissan Micra, develop a love for Werther’s original and leave all of the living to the youngsters. This didn’t happen. There were places to go, things to do and meticulous organisation to be done in advance.
Anne had a great passion for modern music, discovering new acts, going to see them and enthusing over them to her friends. The rear stalls were never an option at a concert, it had to be down the front, standing to the side of the basketball players that always turned up whoever we went to see. When Coldplay were playing at Glastonbury in 2005 on the Pyramid stage we got in position for Hayseed Dixie at noon to ensure we were still there for Coldplay’s entrance at 10.15pm by which time Anne was best friends with everybody around us and had organised relays to the cider tent a quarter of a mile away through a peacetime version of The Somme. She would have print outs of spreadsheets at festivals showing who clashed with who over every single stage with highlighting of people she wanted to see and optimum times for leaving if somebody else was on another stage a mile away, factoring in how far from the front they merited and if this was achievable taking into consideration the band on before and would that band’s fans be likely to leave for another act on another stage. The rain and risk of mud-related diseases common only in third world countries and Somerset were the last of her worries.
I can honestly say there was never such a thing as a bad holiday with Anne. You only need to look at the hundreds of photographs from each expedition to see the joy of discovering new places quite obvious in her permanent smile. Rome, Venice, Krakow, Sicily, Northern Ireland – everywhere we went she would pack as much as possible in while still enjoying simple, good food and always finding dachshunds to stroke. Then she would go home and tell everybody about it and insist they went there as soon as possible offering to give them all the required details of accommodation, places to go, type of pizza to eat, when best to catch the Pope, best place to stand to see him – if she loved a place then she wanted everybody else to experience what she experienced.
In between European expeditions Anne loved to see the coast. A weekend without the coast was a weekend wasted. A trip to Walton, Southwold, Mersea or the River Orwell taking dachshunds up impossible inclines for a better view or through belly deep sand dunes would give her back that spark needed to face the week ahead. Above all she loved Woolacombe. The combination of a dog-friendly house, a 3-mile long perfect beach and the beautiful hills behind were something she would never tire of. Anne had a rule to not go back to the same place when there was a whole world out there to see. But this didn’t apply in the case of Woolacombe. A few hours before her accident she said to me “Burns, if I don’t retire here there will be trouble”.
Anne never had boring jobs. She was a hairdresser, went round pubs emptying fruit machines and re-stocking juke boxes, managed High Chelmer and ultimately settled at Anglia Ruskin University. Throughout the day I would get updates on controversial internal emails, new events to plan and how many courses of food somebody on a neighbouring desk had got outside of that morning. On evenings we would discuss her problems with getting brochures proof read, printed and delivered to Cambridge only to discover that a key course had been cancelled. But all work and no play might have made even Anne a dull girl and I would hear just as much about how excited so and so was because they had got front row tickets for Madonna for all 23 nights or what a tosser somebody else was. She loved her work and those she worked with and the mix of personalities always made it fun as well as paying for pigs ears and Caesar salads.
Most of us here probably have a handful of people we could call close friends, the sort of people you share triumphs and failures with, send birthday cards to, ring up to check up on if you haven’t heard from them for a while and so on. But for Anne her friends meant the world to her and her to them. Not just her friends but her friends’ partners and their children, all of whom she would know and love and be loved. On a regular basis I would get phone calls that sounded as if they were a radio report of a civil disturbance in a country plagued by laughing sickness. But it would be Anne round with the Broomfield girls making moustaches out of anything that came to hand, intoxicated on one glass of wine and far too many pints of love, laughter and the shared experience. It wasn’t just merriment for the sake of annoying the neighbours, it came from that much deeper relationship born in the mutual support through marital troubles, illness, bereavement, depression and Arsenal’s failure to improve on third place in the league. She probably didn’t tell many of you she loved you but it was so obvious in her subsequent retelling of the evening that she loved every one of you and probably had an unhealthy interest in your sons as well.
Anne’s family and their partners are a very complicated subject. Despite her organisational skills my requests for a family tree went unanswered so forgive me if somebody who I thought was a cousin turns out to be the milkman from their ex’s previous house.
She was always very proud to be looked upon as the cool aunt, the one who was subversive at family events and made funerals far more fun than they had a right to be. Her brothers Michael and Derek gave her much amusement in the time I knew her. There were difficult times when Dolly, Anne’s mum, went into a rapid decline and she would call them names when not laughing at how her Mum had just told her she had driven into town despite not having had a car for six months. But they all stuck together and shared a love for their mum. Despite Dolly’s death exactly a year ago to the day Anne’s ventilator was switched off the bonds between them grew stronger even in the absence of the mother that unified them in a common purpose.
Anne’s greatest pleasure was seeing her sons grow from spotty youths into caring men taking so many good characteristics from their mother and father Mick. It didn’t stop her from referring to them as dickheads or lazy gits on many occasions, but the relationship was always one where they were allowed to live their own lives and make their own mistakes. But they always got as much advice and encouragement as they wanted. There was never a stiff parent-child barrier, Anne knew how to have fun with her boys and they with her on a regular basis. They would love the same music, have their latest addition to the wheels on their car admired and critiqued and their friends knew that if they timed it right they would be warmly invited to share the best fry up in Essex.
In the dark days of the Derriford High Dependancy Unit, waiting for the inevitable, the battle hardened nurses were genuinely amazed at the astonishing level of acceptance shown by the family and the love being shown towards their mother. At the end of the day, a few hours before she died they sat by Anne’s bed with Martin’s fancy Mac laptop perched on the pillow next to Anne’s right ear watching two last episodes of Gavin and Stacey together, laughing all the more passionately, knowing it was something Anne loved and they shared.
To say Anne’s life was a life less ordinary wouldn’t do it justice, her life was brilliant, her love was pure to put it bluntly.
In order to give you some moments to reflect on the pictures of Anne showing on the screen we would like to play a song by The Magic Numbers she included on her Anne’s Sunday Slop playlist, but first I would like to read a short extract from a poem by Michael Stock that meant a great deal to Anne.
In my imagination
There is no complication
I dream about you all the time
In my mind a celebration
The sweetest of sensation
Thinking you could be mine
In my imagination
There is no hesitation
We walk together hand in hand
I'm dreaming
You fell in love with me
Like I'm in love with you
But dreaming's all I do
If only they'd come true
I should be so lucky
Lucky lucky lucky
I should be so lucky in love
I read this out to a packed Chelmsford Cathedral on Friday 6th June 2008 at a celebration of the life of Anne-Marie Plummer.
Before I say a few words about Anne could I just make a small request. After the service would all attendees from Anglia Ruskin University kindly refrain from tossing floral tributes in the air in order to avoid injury to fellow attendees.
Immediately the story broke nationally about the mortarboards last week I felt an immediate sense of loss. Were Anne to have been there at her busy Inbox I would have sent her a similar message, she would have immediately got into gear and there would have been a dozen or so messages flying back and forth ultimately labouring the point but wringing out every last drip of humour. That was what she was like and I am equally guilty of this character flaw, as many see it.
Back in May 2004 I was pottering around on the Friends Reunited website looking for kindred spirits to share the empty hours with. I came across a profile without the usual 10 year old picture at a wedding with the ex-husband removed, just the location Chelmsford and the message “you will have to contact me to see what I have to offer”. It was quite intriguing, I had a few other irons in the fire at the time so held off to avoid complexity, then a couple of days later I got a message from Annie2004, her, to Tarquin The Otter, me saying hello. So I replied with the usual sleepless in Great Totham, odd sense of humour, own teeth looking for somebody who isn’t bland, or something along those lines. Oh, and I have two daschshunds.
Back came the reply “You are never going to believe this - not in a million years - hold onto your bootstraps! I live in Chelmsford with my two daschunds - miniture wire haired!!! Hence Dolly and Basil! Honest - I'm not lying! - just to prove it a piccy of me with Basil”
I must admit to having been concerned that she didn’t spell miniature or dachshunds correctly but equally I knew that dachshunds are very fussy about who owns them so there must be some good in this woman and the picture of her in the now legendary orange T shirt showed a woman with a lot of love in her face, towards Basil at least.
In response to another message querying her position on heredity versus environment, the use of fog lights in broad daylight and other aspects of the human condition Anne wrote “as for bland - it's not a word usually used to describe me! - although I know what you mean, the profiles are all similar - we're all young for our age, kind, sensitive etc........”
Despite a pathological hatred of phoning strangers I did the dirty deed and had a lovely, long conversation with Anne where we discovered we had a great number of common interests and attitudes, despite her tendency to interrupt me mid-anecdote on a frequent basis. She sounded, on first hearing, very like Hyacinth Bucket heightened greatly by her calling out to Richard over some misdemeanour involving use of the garden hose, however notwithstanding we arranged a hot first date walking our respective braces of dachshunds at Danbury Lakes from the secret, free parking spot at the lower end, a lady after my own heart. And so began 4 years that changed my life.
As you approach 50 you are expected to settle down, buy a Nissan Micra, develop a love for Werther’s original and leave all of the living to the youngsters. This didn’t happen. There were places to go, things to do and meticulous organisation to be done in advance.
Anne had a great passion for modern music, discovering new acts, going to see them and enthusing over them to her friends. The rear stalls were never an option at a concert, it had to be down the front, standing to the side of the basketball players that always turned up whoever we went to see. When Coldplay were playing at Glastonbury in 2005 on the Pyramid stage we got in position for Hayseed Dixie at noon to ensure we were still there for Coldplay’s entrance at 11.15pm by which time Anne was best friends with everybody around us and had organised relays to the cider tent a quarter of a mile away through a peacetime version of The Somme. She would have print outs of spreadsheets at festivals showing who clashed with who over every single stage with highlighting of people she wanted to see and optimum times for leaving if somebody else was on another stage a mile away, factoring in how far from the front they merited and if this was achievable taking into consideration the band on before and would that band’s fans be likely to leave for another act on another stage. The rain and risk of mud-related diseases common only in third world countries and Somerset were the last of her worries.
I can honestly say there was never such a thing as a bad holiday with Anne. You only need to look at the hundreds of photographs from each expedition to see the joy of discovering new places quite obvious in her permanent smile. Rome, Venice, Krakow, Sicily, Northern Ireland – everywhere we went she would pack as much as possible in while still enjoying simple, good food and always finding dachshunds to stroke. Then she would go home and tell everybody about it and insist they went there as soon as possible offering to give them all the required details of accommodation, places to go, type of pizza to eat, when best to catch the Pope, best place to stand to see him – if she loved a place then she wanted everybody else to experience what she experienced.
In between European expeditions Anne loved to see the coast. A weekend without the coast was a weekend wasted. A trip to Walton, Southwold, Mersea or the River Orwell taking dachshunds up impossible inclines for a better view or through belly deep sand dunes would give her back that spark needed to face the week ahead. Above all she loved Woolacombe. The combination of a dog-friendly house, a 3-mile long perfect beach and the beautiful hills behind were something she would never tire of. Anne had a rule to not go back to the same place when there was a whole world out there to see. But this didn’t apply in the case of Woolacombe. A few hours before her accident she said to me “Burns, if I don’t retire here there will be trouble”.
Anne never had boring jobs. She was a hairdresser, went round pubs emptying fruit machines and re-stocking juke boxes, managed High Chelmer and ultimately settled at Anglia Ruskin University. Throughout the day I would get updates on controversial internal emails, new events to plan and how many courses of food somebody on a neighbouring desk had got outside of that morning. On evenings we would discuss her problems with getting brochures proof read, printed and delivered to Cambridge only to discover that a key course had been cancelled. But all work and no play might have made even Anne a dull girl and I would hear just as much about how excited so and so was because they had got front row tickets for Madonna for all 23 nights or what a tosser somebody else was. She loved her work and those she worked with and the mix of personalities always made it fun as well as paying for pigs' ears and Caesar salads.
Most of us here probably have a handful of people we could call close friends, the sort of people you share triumphs and failures with, send birthday cards to, ring up to check up on if you haven’t heard from them for a while and so on. But for Anne her friends meant the world to her and her to them. Not just her friends but her friends’ partners and their children, all of whom she would know and love and be loved. On a regular basis I would get phone calls that sounded as if they were a radio report of a civil disturbance in a country plagued by laughing sickness. But it would be Anne round with the Broomfield girls making moustaches out of anything that came to hand, intoxicated on one glass of wine and far too many pints of love, laughter and the shared experience. It wasn’t just merriment for the sake of annoying the neighbours, it came from that much deeper relationship born in the mutual support through marital troubles, illness, bereavement, depression and Arsenal’s failure to improve on third place in the league. She probably didn’t tell many of you she loved you but it was so obvious in her subsequent retelling of the evening that she loved every one of you and probably had an unhealthy interest in your sons as well.
Anne’s family and their partners are a very complicated subject. Despite her organisational skills my requests for a family tree went unanswered so forgive me if somebody who I thought was a cousin turns out to be the milkman from their ex’s previous house.
She was always very proud to be looked upon as the cool aunt, the one who was subversive at family events and made funerals far more fun than they had a right to be. Her brothers Michael and Derek gave her much amusement in the time I knew her. There were difficult times when Dolly, Anne’s mum, went into a rapid decline and she would call them names when not laughing at how her Mum had just told her she had driven into town despite not having had a car for six months. But they all stuck together and shared a love for their mum. Despite Dolly’s death exactly a year ago to the day Anne’s ventilator was switched off the bonds between them grew stronger even in the absence of the mother that unified them in a common purpose.
Anne’s greatest pleasure was seeing her sons grow from spotty youths into caring men taking so many good characteristics from their mother and father Mick. It didn’t stop her from referring to them as dickheads or lazy gits on many occasions, but the relationship was always one where they were allowed to live their own lives and make their own mistakes. But they always got as much advice and encouragement as they wanted. There was never a stiff parent-child barrier, Anne knew how to have fun with her boys and they with her on a regular basis. They would love the same music, have their latest addition to the wheels on their car admired and critiqued and their friends knew that if they timed it right they would be warmly invited to share the best fry up in Essex.
In the dark days of the Derriford High Dependancy Unit, waiting for the inevitable, the battle hardened nurses were genuinely amazed at the astonishing level of acceptance shown by the family and the love being shown towards their mother. At the end of the day, a few hours before she died they sat by Anne’s bed with Martin’s fancy Mac laptop perched on the pillow next to Anne’s right ear watching two last episodes of Gavin and Stacey together, laughing all the more passionately, knowing it was something Anne loved and they shared.
To say Anne’s life was a life less ordinary wouldn’t do it justice, her life was brilliant, her love was pure to put it bluntly.
In order to give you some moments to reflect on the pictures of Anne showing on the screen we would like to play a song by The Magic Numbers she included on her Anne’s Sunday Slop playlist, but first I would like to read a short extract from a poem by Michael Stock that meant a great deal to Anne.
In my imagination
There is no complication
I dream about you all the time
In my mind a celebration
The sweetest of sensation
Thinking you could be mine
In my imagination
There is no hesitation
We walk together hand in hand
I'm dreaming
You fell in love with me
Like I'm in love with you
But dreaming's all I do
If only they'd come true
I should be so lucky
Lucky lucky lucky
I should be so lucky in love
[/caption]
Posts
