Wednesday 21 January 2009

Hello Again, Hello. A sad day yesterday, my Uncle's funeral. There are so many tales to be told about funerals. The overwhelming sense is of grief and poignancy, but there is also great potential for levity at such an occasion. You only have to remember the beginning of The Crow Road by Iain Banks, with Grandad's exploding pacemaker.

Let me explain about yesterday. My Dad, whose brother it was, is a stickler for being on time, so with a twenty minute / half hour drive to get to the church, we leave at 11 o'clock for a midday service. It's a good job too, as all available parking spaces are full by about 11.30. Fortunately, we 're ok - we found a space.

The service passes, emotions are let out, hymns are sung, and then the vicar informs us that it's time to go out to the burial ground. Oh, and by the way, could the two cars parked by the gates be moved please, as there's a lorry load of concrete due at the sewage works which is at the bottom of the lane that runs alongside the cemetery. It's a) potentially highly amusing, and b) perhaps more poignantly, an homage to Uncle as he spent 30 years in the building trade. (Furthermore, I couldn't get the faint whiff of the sewage works out of my mind - I've been to the odd one or twenty, you see.)

On the way out to the open grave, there are a line of memorial stones and one name stands out a mile. One Fred Bloggs, Loving Son, born xx-a-1970, died yy-b-2008. I swallowed hard as Fred had been a schoolmate of mine. Apparently, Fred had taken the decision at 38 years old that he'd had enough of life and chose to end it. Of course, why he did, we'll never know - he took that with him...