Funeral

I make no apology for focussing on a personal event today. My aunt's funeral. The last funerals I have attended have been of young people cruelly struck down in their twenties by forms of cancer. Today the emotions were very different, my aunt was ninety three and in reality had been existing rather than living for some time. Exactly when this change occurred is open to question, and I suppose is at the root of many moral discussions about life, euthanasia etc.

Funerals are events that make you consider your own mortality, especially when you are there with your mother, wife and children. Being asked to make a speech in memory of my aunt was no easy ask, compounded by the mother's request not to make it too personal. Anyway after a few compromises I decided to hang it all on the difference between a long innings and a good innings. I'm not sure Geoffrey Boycott or my boyhood hero Ken Barrington would indistinguish between the two.

The lashings of evangelical christianity were as ever difficult for me to cope with. I understand that these are sincerely held beliefs, I just wonder whether these people would exercise the same level of tolerance to people of no faith like myself, as I'm expected to exhibit to them. As ever I'm left asking myself how people such as these can be so fixed in their views. In the past I may have been descibed as politically dogmatic, but my political rigidity pales into insignificance when compared to religion. I commented to my son after that there must be a business opportunity for secular funerals.