Great Aunt Ethel el morte

Today I drove to Birmingham for GAE's funeral. She was my Dad's aunt but we'd never met while she was alive. This I think is a sad thing.

I was glad I went today. Ethel was our last link to the Hudsons, and my Dad's real mum who died of an asthma attack, right in front of him, when he was four years old.

May: that was her name.

We've always had a rose-tinted view of her. As if she'd been around everything would have been a lot better for my dad, who had a pretty unpleasant childhood at the hands of the Dundee Stepmother who washed his hair in fairy liquid and treated him like a servant for a long long time.

I don't know what May was like - but she was Ethel's sister and so it seemed important to mark today, if only for my Dad.

I like a good funeral though. I think it's the one thing the church does really well. Emotion wringing hymns like 'Abide with me' which allow the men to cry with dignity ... The vicar talking about Vera Duckworth in the address. Bizarre, but very British.

I get a real sense of closure from the ceremony as the final clumps of wet earth thud onto the coffin lid deeper down in the ground than you thought it would ever be. And then the other gravestones. Eileen Crump, William Bytheway. Names you couldn't make up or imagine, are there.