Paints a thousand words

I am contemplating a funeral oration.

This is not an easy task.

I have hunted through the mighty Internet for the received wisdom about what to say about somebody who has just died, and frankly, when I die, don’t look there.

There is an awful lot of twaddle about the deceased person being only in the next room, which is clearly rot, since if they were only in the next room you would be able to shout for them and ask if they had remembered it was their turn to empty the dogs. There is even more twaddle about resting in the arms of God, which is worse. The image of God as a chap with his arms stuffed full of dead people is not one I wish to contemplate, after the first couple of days he wouldn’t have any hands spare for counting the hairs on everybody else’s heads and watching out for plummeting sparrows. It would be worse than trying to bring in the washing in a hurry and not having any pockets for clothes pegs.

In any case my father was not given to flights of fancy about the Almighty, even on wet washing days, which has been today, incidentally. I have tried to get four loads of washing dry with no success whatsoever, I am not speaking to the Weather Gods at all at the moment.

Neither can I think of anything sentimental to add. His last words, more or less, were: This is a bugger, which is not the sort of thing that I can imagine having cut into his gravestone, although you can put it on mine if you like.

I am busily trying to write something sensible that I can say. So far I have got: I Wish He Wasn’t Dead, which just about sums up everything I want to say. This is all very well but rather more brief than is usual at most funerals.

I have been trawling through pictures. Oliver has put them on a memory stick for me, so we can play them in the background and give people something to look at whilst we all stumble through variations of We Wish He Wasn’t Dead, and to save us the odd thousand words here and there. These are rather splendid. There are lots of memories of our trips to Blackpool, some of which I rather think my mother might censor out if I included them, like the ones covered in fake blood where we were pretending to be sheep-stealers in the Tower Dungeon, and took it in turns to have a go in the stocks. Then there was the Star Trek Exhibition, where my father insisted on being Captain Kirk, because of seniority, and Mark and I had to be Sulu and Uhuru, except that I wasn’t wearing a mini-skirt. We ate lots of doughnuts and fish and chips, and there is a good photograph of Mark and my father both pretending to be Elvis Presley, you will have to come to the funeral if you want to see it.

My sister sent me lots of photographs as well, from my father’s email address, which was uncomfortably weird to see, and my mother remarked that he seems to be holding a wine glass in almost every single one, which was true, certainly of the ones taken after he left school anyway.

I abandoned the project with some relief when Lucy turned up. She is, as I reported, off to Sol Fest, without anything resembling enthusiasm, as far as I could see, probably because camping in torrential rain and high winds does not necessarily promise to be a happy adventure. She had come to raid Oliver’s Gordonstoun kit, which is well-stocked with the sort of equipment that enables students to survive on school trips to the Arctic circle, and went away looking marginally more cheerful.

I hope she has a nice time.

I am going to carry on contemplating my father’s wine consumption.