I'm so snap happy so I can always remember

Including them, I'm sure.

But there's a reason for my persistent snapping.

It has been 20 years this year since my best grandad left us forever.

He was young, and lung cancer snatched him away from us before I'd even had chance to ask him what he was listening to on his Walkman.

Like everyone, I thought my grandad was the greatest one ever. He was a super fisherman and a hard worker. He worked six days a week for my family and made stuff in his shed.

I really loved him.

I was only seven when he died, but I remember it clearly. It's weird how you never forget the moments that fundamentally change everything you know.

Even now in the summer, I catch the smell of his shed – wood and oil on tools – on the breeze and I think about him.

I wish I had got to know him better. I wonder whether he would have liked me as an adult and whether we would have got on, or done things together.

When I was very much smaller than I am now, I visited the shops with the family. My nan and auntie had gone into the shops and so grandad took me to McDonald's for a rare treat.

No one was quite sure about what happened between the time we left and the moment we returned to pick my nan and auntie back up, but when we did, I was clutching a Big Mac burger in its huge, late 80s polystyrene box. It was bigger than my head.

In typical tiny granddaughter fashion, I had wrapped my old mate around my very little and very greedy finger. The thought of it makes me laugh ever so much.

I don't remember that time and I feel sad that I don't remember many times with him at all. We just didn't have the means to document them.

When he became poorly, I remember kissing his scratchy, stubbly face goodbye every time I left. I remember sitting next to him on the settee. I remember him taking us through a car wash in his silver motor and I remember feeding the fish with him in the pond at the top of the garden.

I wish that he was around so I could ask him about what music he liked and which films he enjoyed. There are so many things about him that I will never know, like what his handwriting looked like when he wrote my name, or what his Mastermind specialist subject would have been.

Last Christmas I watched a video of him that I'd never seen before and it was so strange. He was walking up the garden in his baggy trousers before kicking a ball around with my brother and the boy next door. I couldn't believe my eyes, and I didn't want the video to ever end.

Some things we'll never be able to box away safely, like scratchy beards on little lips or the smell of a shed long dismantled. But other things, postcards, pictures and videos, definitely deserve a safe spot.

So if I come across a little bit snap-happy this holiday, that's exactly why.