I have had a very busy day.
I have been at a funeral.
Obviously that has not taken all day. Much of the day, being the morning bit, was occupied in dashing over the fells with the dogs, pegging out the clean sheets, paying the weekend’s takings into the Post Office, and hastily running around the bedrooms with a duster.
After that I attired myself in respectable black and Mark’s mother and I went off through the rolling countryside to Hornby.
Hornby is very nice. It is an entirely rural village just to the east of Lancaster, where everybody living in the village seems to be a retired farmer who has left the children to get on with milking and silage and lambing by themselves, and sloped off to attend knitting clubs and Over Sixties Yoga, drama societies, Women’s Institute meetings and the church choir. I know these things were all happening because of the interesting notice board outside the Institute, and thought that perhaps I might come along myself when I become too decrepit to manage the three flights of stairs in our house.
We did not go straight to the church. We went to the Hornby Tea Rooms for a very splendid lunch of Brie and cranberries on toast.
It was breakfast really, because I had had an organisational failure in that department, but it was excellent all the same.
The sun was shining, and I mean really shining, in that benevolent autumn way that makes you think of sun-warmed apples and golden afternoons ambling along country lanes. We could not amble anywhere because of wearing respectable funeral shoes, but we strolled over the rustic stone bridge and past the rustic stone shops and into the gloriously rustic golden stone church.
I had never met the cousin whose funeral it was, and so I felt something of a fraud being ushered into the Family pews, but family we were nevertheless, and I surprised myself by being able to identify a host of relatives I had only vaguely remembered that I had got.
I had not expected to be in the least moved by the event, and had composed myself with an expression of suitable gravity, but when the coffin arrived, carried by half a dozen Young Farmers and accompanied by a distinct whiff of spliff, it was somehow so touching that I almost cried.
They were youthful, and solemn, and nervous, and clearly attired in the best they had been able to rake together, which had obviously been a huge effort for people whose lives involve a lot of mucking out cattle and not very much aspirational middle class showing off. They were muscular and solid and baked brown in the way of people whose lives are almost entirely outdoors, and followed by a host of older farmers, weatherbeaten and uncomfortable in the suits last hauled out for Aunty Irene’s funeral and which might have got a bit tight in the meantime.
It was unexpectedly beautiful.
Afterwards we followed the coffin out to the sunny graveyard, and the Young Farmers lowered it, respectfully, into the ground. Then we all dissolved into chat, being lots of the sort of conversation which goes No I’m Malcom’s Niece and Yes I’m Grace’s Cousin, and Have You Seen Our Sylvia and Isn’t That Trevor Over There, before we all strolled back over the rustic stone bridge to the Institute, where the funeral tea had been prepared.
It was a truly superb funeral tea. We had only just had lunch, but we had an enormous funeral tea just the same. There were sausage rolls and sausages, petits fours and very nice savoury sandwiches, meringues and chocolate cakes and scones with strawberries and whipped cream, and there was lots even though everybody had filled their plates twice, and the Young Farmers three or four times.
The bar was open as well, and lots of farmers took off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves and leaned on it. I might have liked to join in, although I decided I had better not, because of driving.
It was an interesting afternoon. Anybody who thinks they know anything about the countryside ought to spend an afternoon listening to farmers, because they know absolutely everything. I know the chap who writes the countryside column in The Guardian, and I wished he could have been there. I listened, enraptured, to stories about badgers, and about peregrine falcons stealing curlew chicks, and lambing, and wet hay times, until I was quite sorry when we decided, reluctantly, that we had eaten quite enough, and started on our way homewards.
It was a pleasant drive through the gently rolling countryside, and we finished the day with another cup of tea in the conservatory, looking at pictures and gassing contentedly about art, which interests Mark’s mother just as much as it interests me, until we suddenly realised in a panic that it was almost seven o’clock, and time for me to be at work.
I peeled off the respectable black and stuffed it in a bag for the dry cleaner tomorrow, before a hasty dog-emptying in the Library Gardens and dashing out to work.
It has been a thoroughly nice day, even if it was a funeral.
