London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
This one’s personal.
How could it be otherwise.
I went to a friend’s funeral yesterday. A much-loved old actor.
Bill.
He had a good innings, well up into his eighties, but still… there’s no softening that final full stop.
A couple of things stayed with me.
The service was at Mortlake Crematorium.
Mortlake.
It’s one of those names you can’t hear neutrally in a moment like that. You hear “mort”.
Mortuary.
Mortician.
Mortgage.
That last one always gives me pause.
A death pledge. That’s what mortgage means.
Sign here, and you’ll be paying it off for twenty-five, thirty, even fifty years.
A pledge that shadows a lifetime.
And Mortlake, with its crematorium, by the river.
You can’t help but drift, just for a second, into the classical world.
The ferryman. Charon.
The dark water.
The crossing.
The River Styx.
It’s not that you believe it.
It’s that the imagination reaches for it.
And then, at the very end of the service,
just before the coffin was taken from us,
the curtains closed around it.
To spare us, I suppose. To shield us from that last journey.
Yes, a kind of heat shield.
But watching those curtains come together… for an actor…
It was a final curtain call.
There was something right about that.
Something fitting.
A life spent on stage, and at the end, the curtains close.
And there’s another thought,
a harder, clearer one,
that I find I don’t shy away from. Fire turns what it consumes into fire. There’s a kind of austere beauty in that.
A transformation, not just an ending.
Now, if you know me,
you’ll know I brood over words.
It even says so in my guide’s bio. Brood. Not a bad word, that.
Life-positive, in its way.
Brooding hens and all that.
And I’ve got this little private pastime.
My own form of solitaire Scrabble. Give me a word and I’ll start turning it over, seeing what other words are hidden inside it.
So yesterday, at the funeral,
the word was… funeral.
And sometimes what comes out of that little game is… uncanny.
For example, four of the letters in the word ‘funeral’ yield up the word
“real”.
Hits home, doesn’t it. Because death is real. Real in the deepest, most unignorable sense.
It lands with a force that everyday life rarely does.
But from those same letters you also get “unreal”.
And that’s the other truth.
The one that sits alongside it.
You can’t quite believe it. Your friend was here, days ago, so alive. And now… not here.
Not ever again. It feels unreal.
And two other words, hanging there like ornaments, in the word funeral.
“Far” and “near”.
Both of them thud home.
At a funeral, the person you’re saying good by to feels infinitely far away. (Aside here, you know what you’re saying when you’re saying good bye? Good bye is really three words. Good. And be. And ye. Or you. Good is God. Be is be. And ye is you. When you say good bye to someone you’re God be with you.
But that’s an aside. Let’s get back to those two words ‘far’ and ‘near’. Your friend in the coffin is very far away. He’s crossed that bourne from which no traveller returns.
And yet, in memory, in presence, he’s also very near.
And there’s another word you can shuck from the word funeral.
The word “fare”.
As in, fare thee well, dear friend. And perhaps, more quietly, this is the fare of being alive.
The ticket we all hold, whether we like it or not.
And there’s another word that flutters out of the word ‘funeral’.
The word “leaf”.
Bill’s life. A leaf on the great tree of life. And now it has come free, and fluttered down.
And finally, the wild card word.
The one that almost makes me wince.
“Fun”.
It’s there, in the word ‘funeral’. You can’t deny it. And it feels all wrong, sitting there at a funeral.
But then you think… any life worth the name had its share of fun. Laughter. Mischief. Joy.
Bill had that in spades.
So perhaps even that word has its place.
For what it’s worth, “funeral” comes to us from the Latin funus. The rites of the dead. The ceremony. The human business of marking a passing.
And that, in the end, is what we were doing yesterday. Gathering. Remembering. Saying farewell.
And all the while, just beyond that moment…
It’s spring in London.
The wisteria is in bloom.
On my Kensington Walk, which runs 104 times a year, there are only two days when I take people down a little cul-de-sac I call Wisteria Avenue. Only two. Because it’s fleeting. It comes, it dazzles, and it’s gone again.
Today is one of those two days.
A day that gets the nod because the wisterial will be at its absolute peak. Cascades of purple. The scent in the air. One of those London moments that just stops people in their tracks.
When I take my walkers there this afternoon, I know what I’ll be thinking.
Their delight. Their surprise. Their sheer pleasure in it. It’ll perfume the air.
And I’ll be saying, quietly, to myself…
All this beauty. All this life. All this joy.
This is for you, Bill.
A London Walks version of Knute Rockne’s famous half-time talk.
Win one for the Gipper.
Well… Saturday in Kensington
We’ll take a walk for Bill. Take a walk down Wisteria Avenue.
C’est tout for now.
See you tomorrow.