Free Amy, My Daughter by Mitch Winehouse

exactly what led to this meeting. But after that encounter she talked about him a lot.
    â€˜When am I going to meet him, darling?’ I asked.
    Amy was evasive, which was probably, I learned later, because Blake was in a relationship. Amy knew about this, so initially you could say that Amy was ‘the other woman’. And although she knew that he was seeing someone else, it was only about a month after they’d met that she had his name tattooed over her left breast. It was clear that she loved him – that they loved each other – but it was also clear that Blake had his problems. It was a stormy relationship from the start.
    A few weeks after they’d met, Blake told Amy that he’d finished with the other girl, and Amy, who never did anything by halves, was now fully obsessed with him.
    A couple of months later I saw Blake for the first time, although I didn’t actually meet him then, at the Queen’s Arms, in Primrose Hill, north-west London, where I’d arranged to meet Amy one Sunday lunchtime. I walked into the busy pub and saw her sitting on some fella’s lap. They were kissing passionately. The pub was packed and I thought, This isn’t on. I got hold of her, took her outside and gave her a piece of my mind – she shouldn’t have been doing that in a public place. We had a bit of a row and Amy told me she had been kissing her boyfriend, Blake. I said I didn’t care who he was, and I was about to walk off when I stopped and turned round. ‘And another thing,’ I said. ‘What’s with all the big hair and the makeup? Who are you meant to be?’
    â€˜Don’t you like it, Dad? It’s my new look.’
    I thought she’d looked nicer when she was a bit smarter, though I had to admit the look suited her, but I didn’t say so then.
    â€˜Come on, Dad, come and have a drink with us,’ she said.
    I was still seething so I made some excuse. It was none of my business where and whom my twenty-one-year-old daughter kissed but I’ve always been a bit hot-headed, especially where my kids are concerned.
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    Amy’s old friend Tyler James says that he noticed a massive change in Amy when she first met Blake. To Tyler, the day Amy met Blake, she fell in love with him, and after that they wouldn’t leave each other’s side. He became the centre of Amy’s world and everything revolved around him. Tyler told me that the first time Blake visited Amy’s flat at Jeffrey’s Place, he offered Tyler a line of cocaine while they were watching TV – not something that Tyler or Amy would normally have come across. Amy was, as I said, dead against class-A ‘chemical’ drugs, as she called them, and while Blake was doing cocaine, Amy stuck to smoking cannabis (which led to her lyrics on ‘Back to Black’ , ‘you love blow and I love puff’). And she was still drinking.
    I found out later that Blake had been dabbling in heroin when Amy had first met him. Tyler, who was staying at the Jeffrey’s Place flat at the time, would wake up in the morning and throw up because of passive heroin intake but he didn’t know for sure that Blake was a user until Amy told him.
    Tyler wasn’t the only one who saw a change in Amy. Nick Shymansky remembers a pivotal moment around this time when he called Amy from a ski trip. She sounded ‘really different’. ‘I’ve just met this guy,’ she told Nick. ‘You’ll really love him. He’s called Blake and we’ve fallen madly in love.’
    Nick came back from his trip and saw immediately that Amy must have lost a stone and a half in weight while he had been away. She started phoning him in the early hours of the morning when she was drunk. One night she called saying she had had a row with Blake and was in a pub in Camden and wanted Nick to pick her up. Nick always felt protective towards