Laura squeezed a full life into less time than she thought she had. I can’t fit that whole life into this eulogy. She would have tried to, as someone whose undergraduate dissertation was 18,000 words, when the word-limit was 12,000.

I didn’t know Laura when she was growing up. Home, family, and school in Potters Bar, and then school in Hatfield, together with friends all around, started her down the path she trod: a life of kindness and drive, with a love of history, animals, and the countryside.

Laura missed much of sixth-form, severe ME rendering her bed-bound, and unable to raise her head. She told me of the time her parents drove her around the old haunts of their youth. She loved it, and was so touched that they’d found a way to take her on a trip while she was so ill. Despite her illness, she flew through her exams.

Having gained a place to study maths at Cambridge, she was quickly let down by a maths department which claimed to welcome women from non-public-school backgrounds. In reality, she was academically abandoned. She compensated by building a wonderful circle of friends, often insisting on communal “fun” activities, such as circumnavigating the city, village-to-village, on foot. At night.

Laura then made the huge leap of faith to abandon the maths which had abandoned her, and threw herself into Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. I was studying this same mainstream subject, and so we met. She excelled, despite not having been an arts or humanities student at school.

At university, Laura volunteered for a home-decorating project for the elderly and disabled, a homeless shelter, and a drama society who put on shows in special educational needs schools and nursing homes. Our friend Dan dropped the keyboard, somehow thereby transposing his accompaniment to Laura’s Oliver! solo far too high for her to sing. She re-formed the Troubadours, and put on concerts of medieval music.

As a Tudor re-enactor, Laura cooked and baked for hundreds. She taught children Elizabethan dance and song with English Heritage at Bessie Surtees’ in Newcastle. She worked with the curator at Corbridge Roman town. She helped Beamish, Woodhorn, and countless other museums in the North East and beyond at the Arts Council and as trustee of the Association of Heritage Interpretation. And she gave her best years to Bede’s World and Wearmouth-Jarrow. Max the dog went to work with her there, and barked at John Prescott.

Laura achieved so much with her writing. She edited a new guide book for Bede’s World, she published an article on Anglo-Saxon music, and she coordinated the enormous documents which formed Wearmouth-Jarrow’s World Heritage bid. She was so proud to work on The Sill’s successful application for funding of eight million pounds, to promote a landscape she had loved since childhood holidays. As an adoring fan of that dreadful Robin Hood film, the loss of the tree at Sycamore Gap hurt her very deeply.

And she loved Falstone and the North Tyne. She met many other local mums, including a surprising and regrettable number of fellow Cockneys, with whom we’ve remained friends ever since. She was a Friends of Greenhaugh School committee member for many years, as well as a Greenhaugh governor, almost single-handedly writing the business plan demanded by the Council to save the school from closure. She briefly played the organ here at St Peter’s. And before Alys and Barnaby arrived to deny us that pleasure, we spent many happy evenings in the Blackcock.

Laura gave everything for her family. She supported me at the start of my career, then with the deaths of my dad, my sister, and my brother, and through Mum’s dementia. She arranged Alys’s volunteering at Kielder Observatory, and has lined up Barnaby to volunteer at Kielder Birds of Prey Centre once he’s older. She got Alys onto the Folkworks summer school, and encouraged Barnaby to perform with the Bellingham and District Dramatic Society.

Laura helped her mum through serious illness, and supported her dad after we so sadly lost Janet a few years ago. She couldn’t do as much as she wanted, and she was so deeply grateful to Brenda and her family for doing as much as her, and then more, despite their living at the other end of the land.

Laura’s ill health forced her to withdraw, one by one, from many of these aspects of her life. She had to stop volunteering, and lost touch with many of her friends. A fall last year prevented her from walking the dogs any more. She railed against it, but knew that her strength was diminishing. These were the necessary sacrifices to allow her to plough her remaining energy into work and family.

She worked right up until her final hospital admission, and was planning to go to another university open day with Alys next month. She was looking forward to Barnaby’s school show Oliver. In her last two weeks, she helped her dad at home after an operation, and she chose the flowers for the pots planted with her mum’s ashes.

Laura died on the feast day of Julian of Norwich, the first woman whose writing survives in English. She would have laughed at the comparison, and promptly dismissed it as both absurd and historically naïve.

Back in 2004, Laura came up with the idea that we should buy a share in a narrowboat. We’ve since had so many wonderful holidays over the years, and Alys and Barnaby have grown up on the canals. We’re due to have our last holiday on board this summer, before she is sold by the syndicate of owners, against our wishes. The boat is called Willow, and we therefore chose a willow coffin for Laura. She’ll therefore get to stay in Willow forever.

The 25th of August this year would have been our silver wedding anniversary. Barnaby and I found a beautiful amethyst ring at the silversmith’s in Hexham a few weeks ago. It mirrored her amethyst engagement ring from Past Times in Eldon Square where she worked when she first moved up to the North East. I didn’t get to give it to her in time, but she’s wearing it now.

Before we met at university, Laura suffered with ME as she entered sixth form. She missed out on so much, as her friends, who saw her frequently and kept her involved of course, nevertheless started to go out and socialize while she was immobile at home. After her recovery, as soon as I got to know her, I could see she was making up for lost time. According to her, she was the one always organizing activities for her friends at university. She expressed a certain frustration at the natural disinclination of others to make fun plans, but this was couched in a very real and wry self-awareness that her drive was unusual and often comic.

We started our life together, and almost everything fun I can tell you about that life almost certainly started with her. We hitched to Paris and slept in bin-bags under the Eiffel Tower, drinking apparently the only vile bottle of wine for sale in France. We walked part of the Ridgeway and drank a pint among the Avebury stones. We bought our first house. We got cats. We made each others’ wedding rings. We moved to the remote countryside. We learned to sail. We got our first dog. We took a cruise across the North Sea. All of these were Laura’s ideas.

It was Laura’s idea to buy a share in a narrowboat. Over twenty years on, that ownership is sadly coming to an end against our wishes. I can’t believe it will have outlasted her, but it means she got to enjoy it until the end. It was one of the best things we ever did, as holiday after holiday was an absolute joy.

Once the children were born, it was Laura who organized activities time and again for them both. Alys now has her grade 6 in tap dancing, thanks to Laura starting her in lessons when she was four years old. She has been volunteering at Kielder Observatory since she was fourteen, and is applying to study astrophysics at university. Barnaby loves learning the piano and performing with the Bellingham and District Dramatic Society. He will hopefully start volunteering with birds of prey once he is old enough, after Laura set the ball rolling.

We went to music festivals, we had holidays abroad, and we had a fabulously packed London trip just last year, seeing Shoot From the Hip, The Play That Goes Wrong, and Matilda. We camped and walked, and went to Riverdance and the Strictly Come Dancing live show.

Sometimes Laura’s planning was overambitious. Sometimes she was frustrated at the lack of time to do what she wanted. She was famously quite astonishingly terrible at estimating how long any given task would take. We had holidays of which we missed the first two days (out of seven) because of her passionate hatred of packing.

Laura supported me through the deaths of my uncle, my dad, my sister, and my brother. She took Mum to Chinese watercolour classes after Dad died, and was there through Mum’s increasing dementia and eventual move to residential care. She was hit so hard by her mum’s death, and looking back, perhaps never really recovered from it. None the less, she arranged holidays to Istanbul and Toledo for us and her dad.

We went back to the old town on Rhodes last summer, and revisited many places with the children which delighted us when we first went in 2000. The day before we were due to have a week on the narrowboat in February, the doctor told her that she simply must not go. I took the doctor’s advice, and absolutely insisted that Laura stay safe with her dad, within reach of medical care and support. You will be unsurprised to hear that my insistence fell on deaf ears, and Laura enjoyed what turned out to be her last holiday on Willow, again revisiting favourite places from the last twenty years.

In the last two weeks before she died, Laura went to stay with her dad to take care of him through post-op recuperation. She went with him to buy the plants to go in the pots laid with her mum’s ashes. She lost all strength. I knew things were more serious than they had ever been as she stopped reading, and was sofa-bound, comforted by “crap telly”, as we always described it. But she still heard Alys perform a solo piano piece at her school concert. She still spoke lucidly and made plans with her manager at work.

Laura has gone, and the hole she leaves in our lives is incalculable. I knew we could lose her, but the suddenness has left us baffled. If I can do a tenth of what she did with us, I’ll be proud. And she’d be cross that I’d not done more, as she always did.

We met at university, studying Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. Laura loved Anglo-Saxon history and palaeography. Her love of manuscripts started earlier. She described looking at a reproduction of the Lindisfarne Gospels with her grandmother. Laura said “It’s so old!”. Her grandmother replied “I don’t like it because it’s old, but because it’s beautiful.”

In our last year at university, Laura revived the Troubadours, the university medieval music society. She broadened it out from a single hurdy-gurdy player to a fabulous group of enthusiastic amateurs. It was important to her to welcome everyone, in contrast to some university music groups. It was a highlight of our time at university, and we remained in touch with several members.

When Laura moved up to Newcastle after we graduated, her first job was at Past Times. She made great use of her staff discount, albeit on less than the minimum wage, a couple of years before such a minimum wage existed in this country.

Laura then spent a couple of years in the funding sector, and during that time published her article Some Anglo-Saxon Cuthbert Liturgica: The Manuscript Evidence. This prefigured her association with Bede, and built on her work with early music, specifically neumatic notation. Since it was published before we married, she kept her maiden name throughout her professional life: Laura Sole.

Laura then landed the job of Museum and Education Manager at Bede’s World in Jarrow. She was thrown in at the deep end, promptly being required to tell some of the specialist craftsmen who were building the reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village that their work was finished, and their contracts would not be renewed. It affected her deeply, as a young southern woman, newly appointed, affecting the livelihood of incredibly skilled northern craftsmen.

Laura then did something which probably defined her professional character. She knew that the Lottery-funded huge capital project to build an enormous new museum was very close to its proposed grand opening. However, she strongly believed that the interpretation for the permanent exhibition was not good enough. Laura understood the implications of this, and yet told truth to power, in arguing to the board that the opening should be postponed. They were persuaded by Laura’s authority, and the opening was put back.

Laura then threw herself into every aspect of getting the museum ready for opening. She edited, rewrote, and argued every interpretation panel. For her, the cardinal importance was to show what an extraordinary place of worldwide significance Wearmouth-Jarrow was. She railed against designers’ obsession with Vikings, arguing with characteristic dryness that concentrating on the people who destroyed monasteries was probably not preferable to celebrating those who lived and worked within them.

After a successful opening, Laura worked tirelessly to promote Bede’s World’s primary raison d’être: to educate and inspire people about Anglo-Saxon England and Bede. Her drive for authenticity was what motivated her. In her time at Bede’s World, she edited a new guide book, wrote and collaborated on temporary exhibitions, organized academic lectures, and was the voice of authenticity for the reconstructed Anglo-Saxon farm.

Laura’s academic side did not preclude the everyday logistics and realpolitik of working for an independent museum. She built partnerships and repaired damaged relationships. Her funding knowledge was a huge benefit to the museum. She helped commission artwork - always authentic to the museum’s core purpose - and brought international scholars, curators, musicians, and authors to Jarrow to give talks and performances. She smiled as our dog Max barked at John Prescott.

Laura was humbled to work with scholars such as Michelle Brown and Professor Rosemary Cramp. Professor Cramp’s death hit Laura harder than she expected it to. She would utterly dismiss the comparison, but her standing inside a collapsed septic tank had a similar vibe to Professor Cramp weeding the Bede’s World garden.

Laura naturally became centrally involved in the gathering momentum behind the bid for World Heritage Status for Wearmouth-Jarrow. When a full-time job was created to work on the bid, she knew she had to apply, though she was torn in two at the thought of leaving Bede’s World. Several intense years of partnership management, academic research and writing, and community building followed.

The World Heritage Status bid was rejected. This hit Laura hard. For it to fail after so much work, and for such unfair reasons, was a bitter pill to swallow. For her to have left Bede’s World in order to work towards it was very upsetting.

Laura’s professional involvement with Anglo-Saxon history and palaeography largely ceased after that. Bede’s World subsequently closed down. While this is hardly a disinterested opinion, perhaps it would have survived with such a passionately informed historian and multidisciplinarian as Laura back with the museum. Who knows?

Laura’s love for history, and Anglo-Saxon in particular, was lifelong. My belief is that the long long unpaid hours she worked above and beyond to get the museum to a quality fit for opening took its toll on her. She learned a pattern of overwork and stress, and this carried on through the rest of her career. But I don’t think she would have missed it for the world.

Laura and I met at university, and she agreed, when we graduated, to move up to Newcastle from her native Hertfordshire. From the very beginning, work was incredibly important to her. She defined herself by it.

Laura started out with a shop job in Eldon Square - do people remember Past Times? She also did a little office cleaning work, and served at The Bay Horse in Dinnington. She was known as the Cockney Barmaid, and she and the locals found their mutual incomprehension of each others’ accents extremely funny.

Laura’s next job was for English Heritage at Bessie Surtees’ House on the Quayside in Newcastle. Having moved from ersatz retail heritage to the real thing, she sought out opportunities beyond the administrative. Together with her colleague and friend Mary, she put on a living-history event for schoolchildren, and she worked at Corbridge Roman site as curatorial assistant. She quickly grew to know and respect many people at English Heritage and in the wider North-Eastern heritage sector.

Laura then moved into funding advice at the National Lottery Charities Board behind the Live Theatre, close to Swan House Roundabout, then North Tyneside VODA at Linskill in North Shields, and Groundwork in Easington. I think it was VODA which really cemented her love for her adopted North East. She loved helping out small organisations such as the Tynemouth Model Boat Club and many, many others. During this time, she also started a law course, qualifying in criminal, contract, and I think property law.

Then came the beginning of her career in heritage, perhaps foreshadowed by Past Times, when she amazingly landed the job of Museum and Education Manager at Bede’s World. The museum had received a multimillion-pound capital grant (remember them?) to turn the small Bede Monastery Museum into a major attraction. She threw herself into the interpretation for the permanent exhibition, and early on had to recommend the postponement of the grand opening, not an easy thing to have to say in a new job.

We married in 2001, but because she had published before we did, she kept her maiden name professionally throughout her career: Laura Sole. Around this time, Laura successfully completed an MA in Museum Studies. She later had her prime professional focus and commitment acknowledged in her appointment as Curator at Bede’s World, later stepping up to Acting Director.

The plan was then devised, and the partnership formed, to bid for World Heritage Status for Wearmouth-Jarrow. Laura was appointed jointly by Sunderland and North Tyneside councils to work on the bid. The bid was ultimately unsuccessful. A lack of support and belief from a key senior individual at DCMS combined with an academically inept application assessment guaranteed that the bid could not succeed. The assessor’s report described the standing Anglo-Saxon remains at Wearmouth-Jarrow as being less significant than those at Lindisfarne. There are no standing Anglo-Saxon remains at Lindisfarne. Despite this, the Wearmouth-Jarrow board decided not to appeal. Laura strongly disagreed with this decision.

It was during Laura’s time at Wearmouth-Jarrow that Alys arrived, as if she didn’t have enough on her plate already. Alys’s achievements made her prouder than Alys probably knows.

Laura then joined Northumberland National Park Authority, where I worked, to build the funding case for The Sill, a new visitor centre on Hadrian’s Wall. This marrying of her love of heritage and the countryside with her knowledge of funding and the law was an inspiration for her, and she played a big role in achieving success. After the failure of the Wearmouth-Jarrow project, this was incredibly important to her. I was proud to play a small part in the fitting out of the Sill to achieve the vision of which she had been a huge part.

A short stint at South Tynedale Heritage Railway followed, and around this time, Barnaby joined us. It was an extremely hard pregnancy, but Laura kept working. Barnaby’s apparently bottomless kindness and humour have been the hugest joy to Laura. I’m not sure she would have made it this far without Alys and him.

Then followed Laura’s decade at the Arts Council. During her time there, she helped such organizations as Beamish, Woodhorn, Bowes Museum, Sunderland Museums, and of course her beloved Jarrow Hall. Much like her time at VODA, she loved being involved in the cultural heritage scene of the North East and the rest of the country, and her role as Relationships Manager dealing specifically with Museums meant that she’d successfully continued her professional life in heritage until the end.

This piece concentrates on Laura’s work. It was so unbelievably important to her. I have always been, and will always remain, in total awe of what she achieved.