This is what I wrote to read out at Sam's celebration, for those of you who could not make it; I first met Sam in 1986 at Manningham sports centre circus workshop where I was practicing trapeze and he was juggling. I was invited to the Bavaria pub after workshop where Sam gruffly asked me out on a date, this was to be the first of many ‘first dates’ that we have had. We were always competitive about our chosen art forms, I had to insist on an aversion to jugglers and he never admitted to watching aerial shows. In truth I actually admired what he was doing and loved the way he told his ‘on tour’ stories, my favourite was the time (Christmas day?) that the sarostes were eating a meal at a service station and noticed outside the window that Sam’s little yellow van had caught fire(Sam told that a lot funnier). Equally it turns out that Sam did watch my trapeze shows, but he made up for that error by critiquing them mercilessly. Sam told me that the rule for his juggling show was that apart from the uniclye if it didn’t fit in one suitcase it wasn’t allowed in the show, he enjoyed the laugh he had of arriving at a booking and seeing that we had been there rigging since the day before and would be there derigging long after he smugly closed his suitcase and departed. Like so many of us here my friendship with Sam involved many on-going discussions , conversations and disagreements on a whole range of subjects that we both felt passionately about Topics ranged from whether the flowering heather is pink or purple, how many different words there were to describe green, ( and…actually and bringing up children, politics etc!). Discussions were invariably over a pot of tea at the kitchen table or on our long walks together on the moors. We were set in our ways and always stopped at the same moorland tea drinking spots, each with our individual flask, as we could never agree on the same tea. We had planned to go travelling together when our respective children were a bit older, we were making a list of some of the natural wonders of the world we would like to see, despite this dream we always agreed that there was nowhere more beautiful than the Yorkshire moors. Sam loved Heaton woods. When it snowed he said it looked like Narnia and he was always pleased to spot the first bluebells there before they appeared behind my own house. He stubbornly fought to keep building work off a local right of way in his woods and was so proud when he won the fight against the planners. Sam has been an amazingly supportive friend, we acknowledged that we knew each other ‘warts and all’, he has been beside me whenever I needed him throughout the numerous crisis in my life. Sam respected my need to be creative despite not always understanding it and dragged Ruby and Chester to every event I was involved in. His last, and now forever lasting support is to pay for the building of an all important artists workshop in my back garden, typically commenting in his will, ‘build your bloody workshop’. Our friendship has not always been smooth or constant, one of our on-going disagreements was exactly what our friendship was, Sam would close each discussion on this topic by saying ‘well you see it how you want to, and I will see it how I want to, and we can both be happy’. Sam would be pleased to hear that our 34 years of roller coaster friendship is completely irreplaceable.