These are notes written for Joan's funeral. I was only able to use parts of them as we had 30mins to share between myself and Dan plus "25 photos to music".  The crematorium was busy that day and we had to book a long way ahead to get even this short time.
Blackpool
Joan was born in Blackpool in 1935 to Dorothy & Tom Gibson.
Her birth was followed by two sisters, Dorothy and Christine.
Their house was a newly built semi-detached with a small garden.  As more houses were built, the building site became a playground and a set of climbing frames.  There were walks in Stanley Park and trips to the beach.  Also, football to watch Stanley Matthews playing and rare trips to The Lakes and to the Isle of Man.
Somehow money was found for a piano plus basic piano lessons all three sisters and Joan learned to play simple music, no doubt leading to a subsequent and lasting enthusiasm for orchestral music
It was not a hugely spacious house. It became extremely cramped when it was shared with another family for a period during WW2.
Studies
As a teenager, Joan went to a girl’s school but was allowed to go to the boy’s school to study some science topics.
Eventually she obtained a place at Leeds to study Physiotherapy – a long bus ride there and back in holiday times!
Work
Joan’s first work was at Birmingham and finally at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol.  She liked the work but not the geriatric wards.  She became friends with another Physiotherapist, Jean Ward, and the two of them became attracted by the idea of going to New Zealand for £10 passage – provided one stayed at least three years.
In those days the voyage took 60 days on a cargo boat that stopped at many ports on the way, which did mean they could do some exploring of the areas around the harbour.
The work was initially in Aukland and the weekends meant they could explore the north island and see interesting things like hot springs and geysers.  They found out about staying in remote cabins or “Batches” where there was wood and a stove to cook, plus an axe to chop wood for the next visitors. Otherwise, they had very basic tents with the tent, sleeping bags, food and utensils to be carried.  Life was good and interesting: perhaps even better than trips to the Lake District in the UK.
They also spent some time working at the hospital in South Island at Christchurch.
Finally, the three years were up and, after a short spell of factory work due to a mismatch of contract dates and boat sailings, they set off home to the UK.  Again, it was a tedious 60 days journey, lightened by visits ashore on a different route from the outward journey.
Back in the UK
Once back they needed work and they ended up in Oxford, sharing an upstairs flat.  Sister Dorothy and family had a nearby flat for a short time between houses.
One of the Oxford Physios was Cissa Metcalfe, whose husband had a garage at Deddington and owned a vintage car.  Cissa invited them around on a visit and also invited a young man who also owned a vintage car and had a stone and thatched cottage at Greatworth.  They visited the cottage and also had rides in the open Lagonda tourers.
The young man seemed to like them and was particularly interested in Joan. He must have seemed a poor prospect since he was married man but separated. In those days, one could get a “no-fault” divorce after six years of separation. Quite a long wait!
Kano, Nigeria
Meanwhile, Joan had planned another overseas posting to any interesting destination and finally found one to work a three-year contract in Kano, Nigeria. The young man was very persistent and managed to get Joan to write to him from Nigeria and, so started a long series of letter exchanges. These went on until Joan’s mid-term leave.
Joan did not know what to expect from life and work in Nigeria. She was delighted to find that another expat had finished her contract and was giving up her single-storey bungalow and would like to sell Joan her VW Beetle. This turned into horror when she discovered that the bungalow came with four domestics: Houseboy, Cook, Gardener and Night Watchman. She initially refused, saying she could look after herself, but she found them on their knees and pleading with her to keep their jobs and the income that their families depended upon! So, she ended up with a staff of four to look after her.
The Night Watchman’s duties were to spend each night sitting in the porch area with a sword at the ready. This was not entirely a success.  One night she was woken by some sounds and saw a shadowy figure rush from the wardrobe across the room and dive out of the window. On checking, it seemed that the only missing item was a white cotton lab coat. It was only when her mid-term leave approached and she started looking for her warm overcoat that she realized that it was missing too.
Leave in the UK
The leave was a very generously long one – so much so that she bought a Morris Minor Traveler from a friend of my father and so was able to travel from Blackpool, visiting Dorothy and Christine. She was partly based in Blackpool and partly in Notttingham with her sister Christine – very conveniently close to Loughborough where I was now a lecturer at LUT.
My work was a limitation, but we still managed to travel together to the Lake District and to Scotland, where Joan learned to ski.
It all finished too soon and Joan had to go back to Kano.  The second half of her tour was marred by civil war in Nigeria. Locally, it took the form of Hausas attacking and often killing Igbos – although the Hausas were stopped from entering the hospital to attack patients. It did put some restraints on travel and movement, although there were never any attacks on Europeans.
Joan was always fascinated by the ability of locals to speak several languages.  When treating a patient. she often needed to ask questions or to give advice.  She would ask someone who knew English to speak to the patient. If they did not know the patient’s language then they would ask around to find someone who could speak the patient’s language and then set up a string of translators to ask the question and to relay back the answer.
Gradually, Joan learned to a number of useful expressions to talk directly to her patients, who were mostly Hausas. Eventually her contract finished and she came back to the UK.
Back to the UK
When Joan finished her contract in Kano, she shared accommodation with Christine in Beeston and began to work in a retirement home on the edge of Nottingham.
Amongst the things that happened were a trip with friends for a fortnight ski holiday in Austria – with snow much better than Scotland.  That used up Joan’s holiday time and I did one last holiday on my own that summer.
In September we got married at a registry office in Nottingham and had our reception at the Donington Manor Hotel before having a touring trip up to the north coast of Scotland and back before joining with Christine to share a house in Beeston.
We had been looking for some time for a house to buy.  Finally, we found an old three-storey that we both liked.
However, it was more like a ruin than a house.  It had a sagging roof, minimal and unsafe electrical wiring plus rising damp.  The attraction was that we could buy it for cash (£1750 + solicitors fees) and moved in at the start of the year to camp-out in it while rebuilding it in the evenings and weekends.
This was where baby Dan returned to after his birth in Nottingham. Joan had left work and was now bringing up a small child while doing house rebuilding too – accompanied by myself in the evenings and weekends.  Quite a tough proposition when the only heat was a Rayburn stove in one room.
It must have seemed very quiet, being at home day after day with just a tiny baby for company. Although this did change for a while when she had a hearty group of workmen in to rebuild the top floor walls front and back before installing three steel bracing bars and then re-tile the roof with some underfelt for the first time in the house’s more than century and a half of existence.
It took about a year to make the house anywhere approaching a “normal” house and about five years to ease-back on the rebuilding.
Westbrook
By then, Dan had started school at the other end of Long Whatton and Joan had decided she did not want a second child to raise in such difficult conditions. She found something suitable with a post as a physiotherapist at Westbrook – a school for physically handicapped children serving much of the southern end of Derbyshire and situated in Long Eaton – a reasonable car journey away each day. Luckily Dan was a sensible and competent child and quickly learned to get himself home, come rain or shine, before settling in to wait for Joan to come home.
There remained a mismatch with school holidays since Westbrook did not have long holidays with children away from their medical treatment.  Sometimes Joan would be travelling to the children’s homes to give them treatment and Dan might go with her.  We did manage summer holidays, but they had to fit-in with Westbrook times.
Joan grew to like Westbrook more and more and she stayed working there right through to her eventual retirement. She felt it was a worthwhile job, easing the problems of the children - although she always found it hard when a child failed to live long enough to reach the end of schooling.
Dan eventually finished at the village school and moved on to Castle Donington School, reached by school bus each day.
We had a variety of holidays from canal boating, through beach holidays by the Mediterranean to alpine hut to hut walking holidays. Dan liked the beach and swimming, although I am not sure Dan was so keen on the high-altitude walking holidays, but he did win a cross-country race soon after returning from one of them.  Each year we all went skiing in Scotland and he became a proficient skier.
Life after child-raising
It was 1988 that I went to the University of Zimbabwe in the summer to give course in Materials and, when it finished, Joan and Dan came out for a holiday before Dan started at university. I think that Joan was expecting Harare to be something like Leicester transplanted to Africa. However, after bushwalking on foot and getting charged by elephants, whitewater rafting on the Zambesi, and then canoeing on the Upper Zambesi with overnight tenting in game parks on the way, I think she had decided that his was great fun.  More importantly, we looked at our finances and decided that we could do similar holidays each year – just the two of us with Dan becoming an independent adult.
Some good years followed: more Zimbabwe, Thailand hilltribes, 	Peru, canoeing the Upper Zambesi, Angel Falls and Roraima, Sulawesi, Trekking in the Jebel Sahro, Kenya, Borneo, Madeira, Madagascar, Atlas Mountains, Botswana, Tiger-watching, Vietnam & Cambodia, around Mont Blanc, and China in 2011. All of these were thrilling adventures but some could do with comment…..
Our first visit to Madagascar was a full-on wildlife trip with things like night-time walks spotting nocturnal animals, but Joan really fell in love with Lemurs.  Everyone has seen monkeys snatching food and the like, but Lemurs have better manners.  They will sit beside you, soulfully watching the food.  Sometimes they will slowly reach out a paw, stopping immediately at any sign of disapproval. From then onwards, Joan used an email address of lemur@conceal.me.uk for much of her correspondence.
I would like to tell you of the story of our ascent of the Tepui Roraima.  It shows the toughness and the abilities of Joan.  Venezuela is one of the countries in South America that have Tepuis. In the very early days of Earth’s history, much of South America were covered in molten rock which solidified to become a very hard rock which could only be split in a vertical direction. Many millions of years later we now have many vast flat-topped rock areas which has been split vertically to leave each one isolated from the others. Each is only accessible to birds and the flora and fauna are different for each Tepui.  The biggest one is Roraima which spans parts of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana - meeting at a triple-point. Brazil and Guyana have no access to their sectors unless they use helicopters!  Venezuela possesses the only climbable route – where the topmost rocks have fractured in an oblique sequence and trees and creepers have taken root.
For our Venezuela trip, Joan and I really wanted to climb Roraima and see the top of the Tepui. The catering and standards of hygiene on the trip had been abysmal and several people had been ill. I was hit by illness on the eve of the ascent and was advised to remain in base camp.  Joan and I were not having any of this. We set off with the others climbing the tree-covered scree slopes and it was raining.  We got to the main climb, which was scrambling on a mix of rock, trees and creepers. We climbed upwards in the rain, well behind the main group.  At one point Joan found an overhang with some drier rock and suggested a stop. As I looked outwards, I could see a solid cascade of water and said “Joan, we are sheltering from this rain underneath a waterfall”.
Eventually we did catch up with the others at the top where they were camping.  We got into our tent, wrung out our wet clothes, and got into our sleeping bags.  I remained in mine for two days while Joan clambered up and down over slippery rocks while carrying food and drink when she was not exploring the surrounding area. Finally, I had one day exploring the surroundings – I well remember patches of lichen which were scarlet in colour - as well as many other odd features.  Thanks to Joan’s determined help and protection I did actually see something of the plateau on the top of Roraimo.  The next day we descended without any difficulty.
Trouble
It was 2011 when we went on a four-week trip to China.  This was holiday was proceeding well when Joan became ill.  We took her to a local hospital late one evening, when she was put on a drip for three hours and we were advised to get her into hospital the following day.  We did so and we got her into a huge new hospital in Suzhou while the rest of the group went on without us.
The treatment in the hospital was superb and in nine days on oxygen and medicines they cured the pneumonia that she had but, sadly, diagnosed that she had substantial section of the lungs that were not functional (COPD).
We got ourselves to Beijing and rejoined the group, where Joan got up onto the Great Wall of China by lift and walked a short section of it on her final day in China.
Illnesses
When we got home, the diagnosis of COPD “Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” was confirmed and the long downward path was started. I looked back at walk photos at the time and I can now see Joan looking tired.
Even so, we did a trucking holiday South Africa & Mozambique 2013 which did not contain long walks and Joan found it hugely enjoyable. A second trip to Madagascar followed in the same year, but this one was about people and places, rather than wildlife.  Again, she enjoyed the trip, and saw lots more lemurs in zoos and nature reserves.
 In 2016 we went to the Alps again with Rosemarie & Peter but Joan and I did shorter and slower walks, but crossing the Alps by cable car on a clear day was great fun for Joan.  
In 2018 we went to Nerja in Spain with Derby Ramblers - again with her and I doing shorter walks together, but having meals with the group in the evenings. 
2019 included a trip to Poland with Derby Ramblers and Joan could still display her skill on difficult paths, provided the pace was slow.  
Of course, 2020 was the year of Covid and we had to go very carefully indeed. Even so, we managed to find a modern house to our liking and moved to Loughborough into a warm and draft-free house
In 2021 we formed a “bubble” of three with Marie Kennedy, who had better walks around Wilson than we had in Long Whatton.  I do remember Marie getting freezing cold on one of our very slow walks. Later that year we were away in Wales with Jackie & Dan in a nice farmhouse and a heated outdoor pool.
Jumping to 2023 was a really bad year. It actually started in 2022 when Joan was diagnosed with cancer.  She should have started X-ray therapy in December but ended up in hospital with Covid. I caught it as well and was unable to visit her in hospital, but Dan managed to visit her every evening, including Christmas and New year. Once out of hospital she started radiotherapy five days a week for five weeks and these mostly took us all day. Almost at the end of her treatment she was so ill that she was taken into the Acute Care Unit, where she very nearly died but did survive.
By the end of 2024 she was clear of cancer and the first two checkups. Even so, she had 23 nights in Glenfield Hospital to try to improve her breathing.  It was not a success and from then onwards she was on oxygen 24hr per day.
A serious Haematoma in late January 2025 put her back in hospital and from there onwards the path went rapidly downhill until her death on 7th February 2025.
In all of this time of breathlessness and feelings of suffocation, Joan remained clear and competent.  Indeed, she drove her own car 3-4 weeks before her death with skill, judgement and good timing to do the shopping while pushing a trolley with an oxygen concentrator in it.  She did comment she was very lucky to have had such a rich and interesting life.  She was herself right to the end!