Patricia Marilyn Wotherspoon. Tricia Blakstad. Mum. When Tricia was born girls weren’t supposed to be brilliant, but her brilliance was recognised by everyone. She was brilliant, loving, creative, loyal, analytical, brave and incredibly cool. A role model for women and an example for men. Born in Lancashire to Beryl and Bob, Bob’s war work took her to Canada, where Ian was born. After the war, they lived all over the UK. She won a scholarship to the prestigious Cheltenham College, which she hated, giving her a life-long dislike of the school uniform colour green. Her 16th birthday was celebrated on a family holiday in Elba, where she was courted by a handsome young hotel worker. Bob cautiously agreed to them going on a boat ride on condition that Ian went with them, leaving poor Ian rowing while they were otherwise engaged. She yearned to study art, but the family persuaded her into architecture, first at Sheffield, where she was one of only two women in her cohort, and then to London Bartlett. During her university career, and a summer job in America, she was a bit of an IT girl, glamorous and popular with fashionable young men. Bob would make a point of calling each boyfriend by the previous one’s name, and was probably only mildly surprised after a party to find her sitting on the knee of a strange young man whom she was tipsily persuading to stay the night. Unknown to Bob, the two had met the previous year, although Dad, drawn to this “stunningly attractive woman”, had backed off when he saw her engagement ring. That engagement had since fallen through. At Dad’s suggestion, she applied for a job at the BBC and was soon earning more than him, designing sets for Dr Who and Dr Findlay’s Casebook, sometimes holding the sets up during filming so they wouldn’t wobble. She preempted his proposal by saying, wasn’t it about time he proposed to her? After marrying in Yorkshire, they settled in Ealing. Mum quickly became pregnant with us twins and Andrew Cruickshank, who played Dr Finlay’s senior partner, was concerned by her climbing up ladders while heavily pregnant. But Beryl’s habit of renovating houses gave Mum solid practical skills. She was the DIY expert in our family, not least because Dad was hopeless. In each new house, they knocked down walls and Mum decorated in style, with fashionable colours and furnishings. We were born at Queen Charlotte’s hospital, where she was happy to be supplied with NHS branded Guinness. Matthew arrived shortly afterwards to form a “built in play group”. Dad’s work then took them to Yorkshire, where the Yorkshire Post ran the photo of her with us on the climbing frame, leading to dirty phone calls; one of which turned out to be James Mason, but that’s a long story… Back in London, she co-founded the Company of Women in Architecture in a bid to address the industry’s sexism. With Dad working abroad, she was a single working parent much of the time, using a high stool and drawing board, while we played with spare Letraset transfers, below. Eventually, she retrained as a computer programmer, working at Hammersmith council on a mainframe surrounded by sandbags because it was below the floodplain, but too heavy to move upstairs. Never afraid of the unknown, holidays included her driving us across France in our camper van to where Dad was filming in Spain and rough Cahors wine in a primitive shack in the Cele valley. Matthew, Karen and I were trained in bridge and the dummy hand’s importance as a mixologist. In East Meon Mum finally fulfilled her dream of an art degree, her own studio and exhibiting her works. Her art is abstract, dark, and popular - every piece she put up for sale was acquired, showing what could have been. Mum loved London and her friends there. She loved the theatre and opera, and in East Meon she enjoyed 40 happy years, as an active part of the local community, with many friends. She contributed to the Village Design Statement and village events, and co-ran the village cinema. She picked the occasional grape for the Bartletts’ wine, which you will taste later, extended her love of theatre to Chichester and was a director of an Eastleigh Art gallery. Even when suffering from Alzheimers’ towards the end, she would sing, sometimes in perfectly accented French, and never lost her sense of humour.It’s impossible to encompass the life of an extraordinary woman in 5 minutes. I hope you will all raise a glass of that wine with us, to remember Tricia Blakstad and celebrate her whole, brilliant life.