Goodbye

When I was little, whenever we went to see my grandparents my Grandad would always offer to invest my pocket money for me, and my dad always told me not to let him. Grandad's idea of a sound investment was backing an outsider in a horse race. It always amazed me that he could place incredibly complicated bets and still work out in a trice exactly how much up or down he was. When I grew up into a young lady and started wearing make-up and indecently short skirts he used to tut at me and tell me to get changed and wash that stuff off my face.
Sometimes when he was out putting his bets on he'd stop off and buy us a bag of sweets each. He always had a sweet tooth. He also used to get random things like coloured crayons or drawing books. Quite often they were a bit rubbish.
Whenever you lose someone, no matter how well prepared you are for it, you always wish you could have known them better, talked to them more, made more effort to understand what made them tick. But I think Grandad wouldn't want me to spend any time beating myself up about not visiting him much over the past couple of years, I think he'd rather I simply remembered the good times we shared.