Day One

The first day of my retirement was also the day of my mother’s funeral. My mother was cremated, in a willow coffin, in a place called “Mortlake” - lake of the dead. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to organize anything; that’s one benefit of being the youngest sibling. I just had to turn up and pretend to be at church again, singing hymns and chanting the Lord’s prayer as we used to do long ago, before I became a fully convinced atheist. There were eulogies, everyone said what a wonderful, saintly person she had been, and nobody mentioned that she died as a consequence of being tipped out of a wheelchair at church, and then bundled off in a taxi instead of someone calling an ambulance. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the first time her church had failed to look after her. She had to move out of her beloved house and into a care home when she was knocked over (zimmer frame and all) by a car (driven by an ex-minister) in the church car park. Nobody called an ambulance that time, either. It turned out she had broken her pelvis in several places. Oh well. C’est la vie – or perhaps this time, c’est la mort.

My mother, in her tennis-playing days