REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

How appropriate that the anniversary of my father’s death should be Remembrance Sunday. I can’t believe it’s been a year since we were all together with him….anyway, after a wonderful night out with lots of lovely friends and family who all made a huge effort to make my birthday super special (knowing how pathetic I would have otherwise been in my newly single state if no one had made a fuss of me) my mother and two brothers and sister in law went up to the church near me where we held his memorial and joined the congregation to remember our dead.

We lit a candle for him:-

Not many people there for a key service. The five of us chose an empty row out of many empty rows of pews somewhere near the middle. Then a man came up to us and told us that we’d taken his place and huffed and puffed off to sit somewhere else and it was an immediate reminder to me of why I don’t do this sort of stuff very often. You expect everyone in a church or other such religious place to be open and accepting and well, it’s not something you should expect because that isn’t always the case. It was a communion service – ie long and complicated. There were five hymns we’d never heard of so my brother and I didn’t even attempt to join in because we both have the most spectacularly bad voices so even the tiniest hint of an attempt to sing a tune which frankly isn’t a tune at all would have had us in fits of laughter. In between bouts of muteness, listening to other people’s dreadful singing there were several readings that made no sense at all – something about slaves being given talents and burying them in the ground. I thought the sermon would be at least relevant to wars and fighting and loss and what God perhaps said about killing each other, but no. It wasn’t. Then we had a moment when my heavily pregnant sister in law looked as if she was about to give birth on the spot after a reading that included “and so it will happen, just as a pregnant woman will have to deal with labour pains FROM WHICH THERE IS NO ESCAPE”….her face. Terrified. Then my younger brother went from quietly weeping at the mention of my father’s name to full on hysterical laughter – it was during the personal prayers for the ill and the dead oh and for those “going through difficult separations”….she closed her prayer by saying “and finally, we pray for all our souls” except my brother thought she’d said “and finally we pray for all arseholes”. Which my father would have loved. Anyway, as a team we were not very well behaved.

On another note – took horrendous pictures mostly of the night before out with friends – one of the last ones, rather late was bizarrely of a friend’s shoe. She has come up with a massively ingenious way of saving money on plasters and/or insoles for her shoes….in our austerity times I think she might have hit on a very good idea – you could use the much thicker ones for shoes that are not only too big, but in the winter when you need some extra warm padding. Not terribly glamorous mind you – they don’t really go with the look of the shoe:-