Reply to comment

Hi Steve. Oh, the memories of Amanda and your apartment came flooding back!
Amanda was one of my oldest friends. We met in 1976 … and after a few months together we even got engaged for a laugh as an excuse for a party! - That was Amanda.
I introduced her to Melanie (another “ex”!) with whom she went on to form “Blondessence” and they toured successfully all over the world as “an exciting combination of two outstanding talents” singing and dancing their way through lots of fun adventures.
Amongst many of our friends in the UK she earned the soubriquet “Two Steaks Amanda”. – One night, after finishing a main course of a huge T-Bone steak in a restaurant, our host enquired if she’d like anything else, to which she replied “another one of those”. .. and she polished another T-Bone off with equal rapidity hence the nickname by which many of us still remember her with love and affection.
Amanda had more zest for life than anyone I’ve ever known and her remarkable courage in fighting her illness set a personal example for me in my fight with prostate cancer. We’d swap horrendous treatment stories by email and ‘phone, but we always ended up laughing.
My memories of her are countless, most of them happy, a few of them sad. Her courage came to the fore again when she went through a painful experience donating bone marrow to her sister Annabelle who so sadly also lost her fight against the wretched ‘big C’. She was very close to her auntie, Yana, who was a huge singing star in the UK Variety Theatres in the 50’s and 60’s. Another close relative who, sadly, she saw suffer.
Not long after she moved to the USA I met up with her and some of our mutual English friends in New York. Steve’s apartment came in very useful for Amanda! (By the way Steve, it was at that time you were tinkering about with a new system whereby computers ‘talked’ to each other: what we now call the Internet I believe?) Anyway, Amanda took great delight in taking us with her on a tour of her favourite watering holes and – as always - we had a truly memorable time with a lot of laughter.
About three years ago, just before she was diagnosed, she came to the UK and was given a huge welcome at our local pub just down the lane. By coincidence, my wife and I moved 12 years ago to within a few miles of where Amanda used to live in Henfield in West Sussex. Her ‘local pub’ has now been mine for the past 12 years and there were many of the old regulars who still remembered her when she came to visit. Another excuse for a party! Not that Amanda ever needed one.
I will always remember her huge smile, ready wit and wicked sense of fun. I will miss her dearly as I know will many of her friends over here in the UK. As well as the beautiful Nicholas and Leyla, her mum Joan and step-pa David are much in our thoughts at the moment.

For all the fun and laughter Amanda, Thank You!
Rest in Peace, dear heart.