Our three sons are with us, in our home (rather than simply on holiday) for the first time since – well, I suspect it’s the late eighties. With our granddaughter here too, my mother’s funeral has turned into an occasion for a real gathering of the clan.
The funeral itself went reasonably well.
 |
| Moving gesture from my colleagues A wreath delivered, without my knowledge, to the funeral |
The eulogy required a completely different approach. With no projector, it had to consist of words alone. So I wrote the whole thing. You know, properly, in full sentences and paragraphs, even indulging in luxuries such as punctuation.
Trouble was, when I read it out to my eldest son, who’d come down specially from Scotland to support me, the address was stilted, hesitant and unnatural. So I had to go through and take out all the sentences and paragraphs, even most of the punctuation, and just turn it into a series of notes. Which, come to think of it, is rather like a PowerPoint presentation with only pictures: the notes, like the pictures, are just reminders of what I was going to talk about, rather than a list of what I was actually going to say.
That worked quite well. It was a lot smoother and apparently natural than when I read things out. A useful lesson I need to note for the future.
Then we headed back home to the splendidly full house. Fun, though having six people in it does rather underline that it’s just not that big. I was glad that the work we had done I the autumn at least meant we now had two bathrooms.
The event therefore combined both woe and joy. What I wasn’t expecting was wrath too. That came from a surprising source: my wife Danielle. She doesn’t tend to go for the road rage, even though she did a few years ago give a finger to a driver who’d behaved badly to her, only to have him try to open her car door and attack her. She was saved by a passer-by who dragged the aggressive driver away.
On this occasion, though, the object of her anger was our local vet’s. We’ve been making monthly payments to them for looking after our cat and our dogs. Frankly, all we get for that is a supply of flea and worm treatment, worth a great deal less than the monthly payments. However, we also had an informal arrangement with the reception staff that, because we were ‘such good customers’, we could occasionally use their car park to visit our nearest shops, since the vet has the only parking spaces nearby. We agreed not to abuse the privilege, not to take advantage of it too often, to keep the stays short and generally to leave a driver if spaces ran out.
That seemed a fine arrangement until our most recent visit, when a new member of staff ordered us out of the place. Which would have been fine, had she been less rude and not picked on Danielle.
I drove away and was a little surprised when I got back to find Danielle emerging not from the shop, but from the vet’s.
‘That’s it,’ she said, with obvious satisfaction. ‘I’ve cancelled our pet plans and told her we’re never coming back.’
I’ve seldom seen her that fed up, so decided it unwise to point out that this was the only vet we could walk to. Hey, we can drive to another one in the future.
The strangest part of the experience that it felt like the cutting of a tie to the neighbourhood. The death of my mother had been the severing of a major bond to England. This was a much less significant one, but could be the first step on a road we’ve been discussing with increasing seriousness since she died.
The most outspoken Brexiter in the Conservative Party, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has just been declaring that the most likely outcome of the Leave vote is now a hard Brexit. Britain will quit the EU with no agreement in place for future trading relations. Rees-Mogg says Britain has nothing to fear from such an outcome, but he’s an ideologue. I believe the economic damage will be substantial, and will start with a further serious loss in value of the pound and a probable fall in house prices.
My job is one I can do from anywhere in Europe. Danielle and I have long been planning to move to Valencia at some date in the future. Maybe the time to do that is now, while we can still get a reasonable price for our house, and convert both its value and my salary into euros at a sensible rate.
The death of my mother makes that possible. The cancellation of our agreements with the vet feels like a step towards putting the plan into action.
Of course, it means we’ll only enjoy the conversion of our house for little over a year, and would be unlikely to repeat its present overcrowded joy. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve done that. We spent a fortune making our flat in Germany a lovely place to live in, before moving back to England for work. Maybe we’ll have better luck in Valencia.
Meanwhile, the first person I wanted to tell about our embryonic plans was my mother. Even though it was only her death that made them possible.
They’re paradoxical, the effects of bereavement.
No comments:
Post a Comment