We went to a funeral today.
You might remember that one of the taxi drivers died a couple of weeks ago, and he was booked in for his last party at Lancaster Crematorium this afternoon.
Of course we went, we have known him for ages. Number Two Daughter also knew him, but stayed behind to be a taxi driver, because obviously those were in short supply today, and Pegasus Taxis, for whom she is currently driving, had almost nobody left.
I dug our funeral clothes out of the loft, where they have been carefully stored in suit bags awaiting the next unhappy event. At this point we made the depressing discovery that we have both become decidedly rounder since the last funeral, which in fact was also for a taxi driver, a couple of years ago.
We don’t have an emergency back up set of extra large funeral clothes, so we squished ourselves breathlessly into them and hoped for no bursting misfortunes during the event.
We left the children with lots of instructions and the washing to be pegged out, and hastened off. Fortunately we had a bit of time to spare because we discovered en route that Lancaster Council had removed the road to the crematorium and replaced it with a network of dozens of back streets which they had carefully hidden from my phone’s satellite navigation.
We arrived at the very last minute, at almost exactly the same time as a dozen other taxi drivers, all of whom had, in true taxi driver style, allowed exactly the time they expected the journey to take, and then become confused and panicked with the unexpected Roadworks Challenge.
We stood around waiting for our turn, in a crowd of taxi drivers and various local worthies, the crematorium was packed to the seams. We occupied the wait by staring covertly at the unfamiliar sight of one another smartened up, and acknowledging one another with short, unsmiling nods.
Taxi drivers en masse somehow manage to give off a faint air of menace. We stood, heavy and grim-faced, in the back couple of rows of the chapel, and everybody else shunted slightly awkwardly forward, just in case. The sun pouring in through the huge windows glinted on gold earrings and teeth, vaguely reminiscent of piracy, and we all looked at the dreadful box with one of our number still and forever silent inside it.
The vicar who spoke had obviously never met Greg, unsurprisingly, since few people go and introduce themselves to their funeral director prior to the event. On the whole he did reasonably well in the face of what must have seemed a fairly intimidating audience of stony-faced disbelief, and ploughed on bravely with his description of somebody I would never have recognised as Greg if his picture hadn’t been on the cover.
The Greg I knew was cautious, and shrewd, and prudent, and like all wise men, had paid for his happiness with some bitter hurts. I liked him, had done business with him many times, which we did well, mostly because we both knew to count our fingers carefully after we had shaken hands.
The vicar avoided mentioning these aspects of his personality and stuck to describing his lovingness as a husband and father and affection for his caravan. As we filed out to the strains of ‘My Way’ we all glared at each other extra hard so that none of us would notice the wetness around one another’s eyes.
On the way home of course we talked about dying, although obviously we are hoping not to experience it in the near future. We think that perhaps at the end when one of us has got a fatal illness we will shoot ourselves together, or maybe less dramatically just go to bed in the camper van with the gas turned on, especially now that all the leaks are fixed.
Under no circumstances do I want a eulogy from some poor soul who has been obliged to do his research by asking Numbers One and Two Daughters what they think he should talk about, entertaining as that might turn out to be. If any readers are still about when the Day Comes, kindly leave the talking to somebody who has got something to say, preferably somebody who has met me.
Also no badly-scanning poetry.
In the meantime we are going to try and stave off the event a bit further with some self-denial.
How I am looking forward to that.
