My uncle, Mel Thompson, died in July and we saw him off properly at the weekend. I'm glad that many of the pictures here show him looking happy, because even though he was, as my cousin Simon said, "a cross between Victor Meldrew and Alf Garnett", I remember him having a wicked sense of fun and humour.
I hadn't seen him for some years, although the one thing I do find Facebook useful for is maintaining something of family relationships. He was a big part of my early childhood, married to my mother's sister, and we lived nearby each other - his kids, Simon and Clair were our closest cousins, both in age and geography - we spent a lot of time together in the late sixties and early seventies.
I was honoured to be asked to play banjo ukulele alongside my Dad on trumpet, while the hearse arrived and the coffin was carried into the crematorium. We played (by request) "Shake it and Break it" and "Somebody Loves Me" - he enjoyed our kind of music very much and it was lovely to be able to contribute something.
Because he lived on the Suffolk/Norfolk borders the crematorium was in a rural location and not as busy as those in the city centre, so we were able to take out time coming and going. It was also next to a parachute centre and so the first thing we saw when we arrived and got out of the car was people flying towards us with multicoloured parachutes.
It was an unconventional funeral in many ways. The coffin arrived in a motorbike sidecar, driven by a professional but with Clair riding pillion. The cardboard coffin had been decorated by the family ("Goodbye Yampy Grampy!") and at the end there was an opportunity for anyone else to write messages in magic marker on the lid!
Simon gave a lovely eulogy, striking the balance between remembering the good times and telling the whole truth. I'd forgotten the days when he was working on the track at the Austin, two weeks on days and two weeks on nights and we kids had to tiptoe around when he was on nights (we never managed it, always woke him up and experienced his fiery rage).
The three women he lived with in different stages of his life, spoke fondly of him and read poems. There was time for people to speak of their memories (many of which referred to the cannabis plants at the bottom of the garden in the 1980s). And then we had a rousing chorus of "The Sun Has Got His Hat On" to finish off.
A fitting contrast to the staid and solemn affairs you often see and a send off that matched the unconforming nature of the man.
