Mitch Winehouse's Diary

When I was a cabbie I always had music playing: Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett. I still drive around in my cab because, I tell you, being a London taxi driver is the best job in the world. I loved being a cabbie and Amy loved it, too.

I haven't been able to listen to Lioness, I don't even have a copy. I had to listen to it initially to authorise it and after I'd stopped crying I managed to listen fairly dispassionately and really loved it. When the album reached number one everyone was very excited, but in my mind I was saying, 'Well, that's great but of course she's not here.' The album going to number one and all the positives are tinged with a tremendous sadness. All proceeds for the album and my gigs now go to The Amy Winehouse Foundation, which I run. On New Year's Eve I played a gig at the Blue Train jazz club near Waterloo. It was tough - my first New Year without Amy. She was there at every London gig I did, jumping up on stage and then I'd attempt to throw her off.

After just four months we've started giving out grants from the foundation. We've donated three of £10,000 each - the first one was for a charity that I'm a patron of called Hopes and Dreams, which sends terminally ill kids away with their families, and the other two grants have gone to children's hospices, Chestnut Tree House near Arundel and Little Havens in Essex. Hopefully we'll be supporting both of them from now on.

In the first year we've pledged to give £500,000 away and I think we'll manage that and more. I can't be exact but I would have thought that by July we will have raised in excess of £1.5 million. All the money from my book, which will hopefully make in the region of £800,000 without any royalties, will boost donations and Universal is giving £1 of every album sale to the foundation.

Running the foundation is my life's work now. It's what Amy would have wanted. It's a privilege to be able to help children and young adults who are struggling with all kinds of different disadvantages. We're also helping homeless and addiction charities. It's actually very enjoyable and it helps to take our minds off what happened to Amy. We're trying to turn this horrible tragedy into a positive and I think we've started to do that.

Amy loved children and was good with them. She knew everything about her security guards' kids and the other people around her. When she was in St Lucia she looked after the local kids and gave them music lessons. She even hired horses for a month from a guy selling riding excursions on the beach, so that she could put the local children on the horses that were usually only for tourists. Someone tweeted something lovely recently, saying that Amy couldn't have her own children but now she has hundreds that she's looking after. I thought that was a lovely thing to say. That's the way I'm looking at it.

I've nearly finished writing the book My Daughter, about Amy and me. I started at the end of August last year. I felt that in the first instance I wanted to do something because there were lots of misconceptions about who Amy was and I wanted to straighten that out. There were a lot of lurid stories over the years, a lot of which were true, let's be frank, but a lot of them were false. I also wanted to write the book for my own benefit, as a part of my own healing process. When people heard about it they wanted to give me lots of money for doing it, but that money won't come to me, all of the money that I earn from it will go to the foundation.

It will also include a lot of photos that haven't been seen before. It's going to be good. I'm reading through parts of it now and some of it is very harrowing and other parts are very funny, about my family and about Amy and her brother when they were mischievous kids. I'm not trying to reinvent Amy. I'm not saying that she was about to go into a convent. She was who she was, but underneath all of her problems she had a heart of gold. I really want people to understand that.

Mitch will be performing at Floridita on Tuesday 10 January at 10pm; visit amywinehousefoundation.co.uk