Tag Archives: resolutions

Eulogy for my father

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Patrick 5x4My father’s funeral was three months ago last week, and as several friends have told me strictly, it’s about time I posted HIS eulogy to go with my mother’s. His funeral was on December 9, and he died on November 26, three months and a day after my mother. I miss them both so much.

My brother and I accompanied both our parents to the furnace: it needed planning, but after I had conducted a funeral service myself, I had seen how the coffin was left in a corridor waiting for the furnace to be lit and I decided I didn’t want my parents to go the last few yards on their own. For our mother’s cremation, it went smoothly. My brother and I left the church together after the funeral for the crematorium, accompanied by the funeral director and the vicar; he said a few prayers including a most wonderful psalm, I rested my cheek against the coffin, the funeral director said “they are ready” and we went behind the scenes, through the kitchen, and waited while the coffin was pushed pneumatically into an oven so hot that when it went in there was a shot of fire as if by God. It was raw and it was holy. Continue reading →

Happy 2011

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New Year’s Resolutions… I might not make them every year but I certainly think about making them. The one New Year’s Resolution I’ve at least thought about making every year since I was six or seven (and saw a fabulous, tall American-looking woman step onto a curb and call a taxi with Panache with a capital P), is learning to wolf whistle. People have tried to show me over the years – there’s a trick with curling the tongue like a tube, apparently – but so far narry a piercing toot has come from me. Perhaps 2011 is that year.

I’ve had such nice feedback about this little blog (aka collection of random notes) that I might make a bit more of an effort in 2011 to find some emails I wrote to my lovely agent Simon while I was researching the colour book around the world, sitting in various internet cafes to tell him what I was up to. And I’ve also got a scanner now, so perhaps it’s time to put some of the photos up too. We had an intern for a few months at the charity I work at as communications director and I asked her a couple of months ago to scan some of their slides. “Why would you have slides,” she asked, looking puzzled as if she’d never seen one before, “when you could have done it digital?”

Oh, and 2011 is also the year that I’m going to concentrate on writing the first half (why stop at half?) of a story about Italy that I’ve been thinking about for the past four years.

Let this one at least not be like the New Years Resolutions I’ve ignored every year. Let “thinking about” be “acting on” too.

Happy New Year!