Celebration Day: Tynemouth woman joins Home Choir to remember 'inspirational' grandmother

• Report by Kris Jepson

A woman from North Tyneside has joined the Home Choir to produce a song in memory of loved ones and inspirational people who have passed away to mark Celebration Day.

Celebration Day takes place on Sunday 28 May and everyone is invited to take a moment to remember a loved one who has died or someone who has inspired them during their life.

Alison Houston, from Tynemouth, told ITV News Tyne Tees she is celebrating the life of her grandmother, Eleanor Clayton, who died in 1972.

She said it was the memory of her grandma that gave her comfort when she lost her husband, David, in 2016 after only six years of marriage.

She said: "I was very bitter about what I had lost and then I saw a photograph of my grandma when I was sorting things out, and I felt terribly guilty, because I never heard her complain at all about what life had done to her."

Her grandma and grandad married young during the war, but he was tragically taken away from her when he was killed by an explosion.

She said: "Sadly after only four years of marriage he was killed on active service. He was in a bomb. I used to talk to her a lot about Harold, her husband and she’d say ‘oh, Harold was the best’, and she never remarried and I would have thought she would have been very bitter about what had happened to her, but she wasn’t. She was just this wonderfully warm, cuddly person and so when I’m feeling down I just think of lovely Eleanor and she makes me smile."

One of the organisers of Celebration Day, Julia Samuel, said Celebration Day is about taking a moment and time out from our hectic lives to remember and celebrate someone who has passed on and the way they influenced our lives.

She said: "You can connect together with a friend, with a drink in the garden, or a picnic in the park or going for a walk or making the person’s favourite dish so that you remember with joy the person who’s influenced you."