This has been a sad week for me.  A week of loss and of reflection upon the passing of time.  My paternal grandmother has died and with that a permanent and towering fixture in my life has gone.

My grandmother was a quiet woman who held herself with a lot of dignity even in her declining years when she left her city of Glasgow and came here to Girvan to be nearer the family so that we could look after her.  That was nearly five years ago and in that time I saw her most days and got to know her far better than I had as a boy.  It also meant she got to meet her three great grandchildren and see them regularly as they grew from tiny babies.

Cathy Syme and Gavin Syme in the 1980’s

I will remember her as a strong person who held my hand all those years ago and learned me the manners that helped make me the man I am.  From her vantage point of a birth in the year 1919 she had seen the world change almost out of all recognition from when she was a girl in the roaring twenties.

Goodbye Grandmother Syme.

GBS