Kate told stories. She wasn’t a best selling author or even a prolific writer but she loved to tell stories. Sometimes she wrote them down and many were included in local anthologies of short stories but mostly she loved a good ‘blether’. She loved a chatty, girly lunch, or sometimes just a coffee, that I often had the pleasure of sharing with her. Sometimes she told sad stories about her life or about another friend’s triumphs or tragedies but more often they were cheerful humorous tales of recent day to day experiences, or about her life in Callander before she moved to Glasgow. We loved to share and swap books and compare other people’s stories about crime and romance or biographies about the lives of famous people.
Her own life was peppered with the sadness and joy of the family and friends, which she spoke of, some with sadness and regret, others with love and caring and often with tales of happy family events. Her writing brought her many friends as she joined classes and groups of other writers. She had such a friendly, outgoing, and bubbly personality that she almost demanded our friendship. Even a shy and introverted person was drawn to the magnet of her enthusiasm where you felt that you might be her closest and most trusted confidante; even if you only knew her for a few short years, you could feel like a lifelong friend.
She tentatively embraced the modern technology of social media, with a Facebook page, but particularly e-mail and WhatsApp as she could then still chat even though you weren’t right there with her. She never did get to grips with computer document software though and all her stories were hand written. She loved to paint too so could also tell her creative stories in that medium, although with much of the paint over the floor and walls telling the messy story of the joyful methods she enjoyed using.
Kate was what many would call ‘a force of nature’ with her joyful charismatic personality. Her last e-mail to me suggested us meeting soon as she said she was “missing our blethers”. Not nearly as much as I now miss her.
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