Victoria Mary Clarke was just 16 when she met her future husband Shane MacGowan.
The writer was married to The Pogues musician for 32 years but lost him on November 30 last year, when Shane died from pneumonia following a battle with encephalitis, aged 65.
Speaking after her husband's passing, Victoria said the singer would 'always be the light that I hold before me and the measure of my dreams and the love of my life and the most beautiful soul and beautiful angel and the sun and the moon and the start and end of everything that I hold dear'.
And while the widow misses the singer's physical presence, she does not feel her life partner has left her completely. Victoria told BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour: "Shane is very much with me, I don't feel he's gone, when I look at his picture, I feel him smiling at me. And I actually feel a real smile, a real genuine connection."
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Brian Rasic/Getty Images)Victoria told Evoke she had contacted an 'angel channeller' for help with getting in touch with her lost love. "I went to a woman who I thought was going to be a psychic and she was going to give me guidance," she said. "It actually turned out to be an angel channeller.
"Instead of telling me my future, she just channelled love into me from her angels. I felt so supported and so loved and so safe."
The writer told Woman's Hour she found it hard to feel sad about her husband's death because she believes he's in a 'blissful state'. And she said he was helping her every step of the way.
"I feel like he's still here, especially when I'm sitting in his chair or looking at his picture," said Victoria. "I feel that he's communicating with me. I can tell him stuff, and I can feel him watching me and being very much with me."
While Shane was known for The Pogues smash Christmas hit Fairytale of New York, when it came to the day itself journalist Victoria said he wasn't fussed. "He indulged me because I always insisted on having a tree and he would think that was cute with the decorations," she said. "But he wasn't fussed about presents unless they were things he really wanted. He wasn't a materialistic person."
Shane was treated at St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin after he was diagnosed with encephalitis, a condition which causes the brain to become inflamed or swollen. The singer had a long struggle with alcoholism, having had his first drink at just five years old.
Born in 1957, when the singer was just 17 he spent months in a psychiatric unit after his drug and alcohol use led to situational anxiety. He went onto binge drink, use LSD and develop an addiction to heroin, suffering from stomach ulcers and alcoholic hepatitis in the 1990s.
Shane's health deteriorated further in his later years, falling and fracturing his pelvis when leaving a Dublin studio in 2015 and continuing to use a wheelchair until his death.
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