The memories keep coming

Here are some more that show Wendy's particular genius for life:

• Everyone in the family laughed at Wendy's car parking; the word "parallel" just didn't come into it.  But she did invent a really useful technique which I still use when the need arises: audio parking.  It's dead easy to learn - move your car ever so gently till you hear a collision with the car in front (or behind).  Then you know you can't go any further.  Simple!
• Wendy invented the concept of house deterioration.  This was based on her observations from the Leicester outer circle route through New Parks and Braunstone.  (You used to have to go that way to get to the M1 before the new Western Bypass opened).  She noticed that you could tell at a glance which council houses had been sold to their former tenants.  Most new owners immediately got a builder in to make their house worse, e.g. cladding it with bradstone, or putting in fake leaded windows.  It does sound a bit snobbish, but Wendy always hated houses made to look like what they weren't.  She wondered if there were companies that specialised in this kind of work, and how they advertised.  "New Right-To-Buy owner? Give us a call now!  We can deteriorate your house for you!"
• Wendy did a bit of deteriorating herself, I discovered years later.  We finally refitted the bathroom at Craven Street around 2001, at last getting rid of the 1960s avocado bath suite.  After the work was done, she told me she had been carefully deteriorating the bathroom for years in the hope I would notice it needed renewing.  I can't honestly say I ever noticed she was doing it deliberately.
• Wendy liked to mark occasions in family life with a proper ceremony.  The opening of the new bathroom was no exception.  When everything was ready she cut the green ribbon she'd tied over the toilet seat and we both toasted the new bathroom and all who... well, bathed in it.  You can see the photos in my Pictures of Wendy gallery here and here.
• When we moved to our new house in 2005, we suddenly had four toilets after managing with just the one for all those years.  Wendy insisted on a ceremonial four-way flush of all four at once.  She, Duncan, Sam and I all went to wee in a different toilet and on her word of command we flushed together.
• Just another of Wendy's more prosaic observations, but one I've found to be true many times: "Almost everyone you meet on a mountain or a long-distance footpath is nice."
• In our garden at Craven Street was a mature holly tree.  Wendy didn't want it to get too big, so every year she got me to climb up on a step ladder and clip it to a roughly globular shape.  She called it the hollypop tree.

I'm sure that's not the end of my remembering.  But that will have to do for now.