I still text Amy, telling her to come home -- dad

Mitch (60) said that he felt guilty that he could now sleep at night because he no longer had to worry about the songstress.

But he admitted: "Sometimes I text her telling her to come home. "But she's never coming home and I'm going to have to deal with that for the rest of my life."

The late singer's father said that he had not been able to scatter his daughter's ashes but that he had managed to replace the image in his mind of her lifeless body with that of her laughing. He said he could not go inside his daughter's north London home, where the Back To Black singer was found dead aged 27 on July 23 last year. An inquest later found the late star, who had kicked her drug habit, was more than five times the drink-drive limit.

sweets

"I haven't been inside for three months. It's too still," he said. "The worst bit was emptying her sweets drawer. She loved boiled sweets, and there was still a drawer full of them. She could have entered the Olympics for sweet-eating. It broke my heart."

The former taxi driver, who has written a book about his daughter's life with proceeds going to the Amy Winehouse Foundation, said: "I've still got her ashes and my mum Cynthia's. At some point we'll do something with them and they'll be together."

hnews@herald.ie