Let's not have a sniffle, let's have a bloody-good cry
And always remember: The longer you live
The sooner you'll bloody-well die...
To
King's Lynn for a funeral, at very nearly 90 years of age Fred Juby, Margot's old dad, just died while reading an Ian Rankin novel so he didn't miss much ... The service was a strange thing, though quite common these days, I'm told: a non religious event that nevertheless kept to the forms and structures of a religious service. So instead of hymns we had Glenn Miller's foot-tapping In the Mood, John Lennon's Imagine, instead of a prayer a
poem (of excruciating banality) instead of a priest a 'humanist' person reading an obituary. I suppose we should mark these passages from life in some way but give me a good old burial in the deep clay complete, if need be, with
"Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short
time to live, and is full of misery...He cometh up and is cut down like a flower ..." or better still just feed me to the crows rather than being shuffled off behind a purple curtain while Bud Flanagan sings the Dad's Army theme tune.
So any way it was a good day especially as it wasn't my funeral and we got this grand old double rainbow stretching right across the town.
