SATURDAY MORNING, ONE WEEK AGO

I woke very early on the first Saturday after my mother died, that strange weekend which sat after her passing but before the funeral, and, because it had understandably been a very busy week, I decided that I would spend a couple of the wee small hours scanning some of the photographs that my sister and I had been looking through because the Minister had suggested that it might be nice to have one or two of them displayed on the screen in the church on the day of the funeral.

Of course, as "little jobs" go, this took rather longer than I had anticipated and it was also very difficult to reduce a life down to a couple of dozen pictures, but I hoped that the twenty or so I did eventually choose might serve, and I also hoped that she might have approved of at least some of the choices.

I selected a few of her growing up, when she was obviously quite a little glamour-boots, a selection from her wedding and family life, a cluster of holiday snaps, and a small selection of ones from her life in the church, which I hoped would seem appealing to those attending the service and cover the most important aspects of her life.

After that, as also requested by the Minister, I tried my best to "compose" a few lines which might have seemed appropriate, but, perhaps surprisingly to anyone who things of me as a minor-league word-wrangler, I did rather struggle with that, and instead just emailed a few important nuggets with the hope that he'd be able to conjure up the "right" words using those as a guide, alongside any other morsels he'd plucked from our conversations and with members of his congregation, and also from the thoughts which my sister also forwarded on to him.

And so, for the rest of the world, life went on, and more and more of the tiny steps which needed to be taken on the journey to the inevitable memorial service were completed and, in the best traditions of that wartime which my mother and all of her generation went through, we kept calm and carried on.

Despite extreme provocation from the fates because, interestingly, since I'd left my sister at mum's flat on the Friday evening, she'd managed to have a car accident which was, mercifully, not a serious one, and didn't leave us having to deal with a double tragedy, but it was rather the icing on the cake of a particularly dreadful week for my family...