"The Garden Furniture Of Remembrance"

Earlier this year I had to go to a funeral, which is one of life's unsavoury treats.

Other people manage to go to funerals and bear things with a quiet dignity but this is not within my ken, and as a repressed English fool the only time I can ever express feeling is when the person involved is well and truly unavailable, rather as if you are relegated to a perpetual answering machine of relation and you never get rung back. Anyway, the duties we have to the living are probably to make our feelings and thoughts clear while they are with us, as opposed to being stupid enough to not discuss things while the grand socialist Poobah in the sky allows us to do it.

After death and the irritation that you've got to carry on since it's not your turn this week, you get stuck with the business of park benches and memorial pebbles, or whatever currently sufficiently non religious item that you can get. The top of Hampstead Heath's Parliament Hill is getting rather crowded these days with benches that declare "he loved to sit here". In the case of George Michael I think his friends will probably plant a bush with a plaque, but well, it's the sentiment that counts.

Another good way is to put some of the stuff that you can't take with you to an appropriate charity. So this week I will be taking some of those beer tokens and placing them towards the Royal Marsden Cancer Campaign, along with ride out by the scooterists of London to Putney for all those who are, and were riddled with what Denis Potter called "Rupert" (after Murdoch). Cancer is a disease that is badly treated and poorly resourced in the United Kingdom, and while it is not within my ken to bear loss with dignity or source garden furniture as a memorial, I can open my wallet if not my heart.