Wednesday January 25th 2023

The day of the funeral for my sister Jill's husband Peter in Cambridge. And it's a horrible damp cold day. Our daughter Alison is also making the journey today from Headley, Hampshire to attend, and Lois and I have agreed to meet up with her at 11:15 am at the Starbucks concession in the local Sainsbury's supermarket in the Cherry Hinton suburb of Cambridge. It's great to see her again and chat.

we meet up with her daughter Ali at the Starbucks concession

in the local Sainsbury's supermarket

Incredibly my "new" cousin David, recently discovered by a DNA test, is in Starbucks at the same time, but we don't notice him and he doesn't notice us. How does this happen? Well, neither of us were expecting to see the other, and David was sitting at the other end of the café on one of the high seats facing the wall, so I suppose it's not so surprising. We only find out about the coincidence later in the day when we're all at my sister Jill's after the funeral.

After the coffee, we go into the supermarket and try and find Lois a dark slim handbag to take to the funeral, but we strike out. So we drive over to the nearest Asda and Lois gets what she wants, which is nice.

13:30 We arrive at the church for the funeral service, which, as Jill warned us, turns out to be "very Catholic" and formal, with a trio of priests on the platform, as well as the priest officiating at the ceremony.

Luckily, after the service there's a more personal service at the Crematorium, mostly attended by family and close friends. The crematorium turns out to be several miles outside the city. It's a nice service because we hear a lot about Peter's life and everybody learns things they didn't know about him, plus we hear some of Peter's favourite songs. I don't recognise all of them, but they include the folk song "The Wild Mountain Thyme" and something that sounded like Bob Marley. My goodness!!!

17:00 After that it's back to the house where there's a nice post-funeral buffet. This gives us an opportunity to chat to all of Gill's 3 daughters, Zoe, Lucy and Maria, and Zoe's husband Chris, Maria's husband Tom, plus Peter's mother, Tom's father, Jill's high-school friend, also called Jill, and Jill's old friends Helen and Hilary. 

some of the family and close friends at today's post-funeral get-together

my dear younger sister Jill

Jill and I go back a long way. This is an early picture of Jill from about 1958-9 - she's the rightmost face, and I'm the leftmost. In between us are our late siblings Steve and Kathy:

19:00 We drop our daughter Ali off at the church, where she had left her car after the funeral, and then we go home to our guest house. Lois and I both feel completely shattered, and when we get back to the guest house, we more or less collapse into bed and fall asleep. Oh dear, we're getting old, no doubt about that!

I think that partly we feel so shattered because of the travelling about, not just coming to Cambridge over the previous 2 days, but also driving about Cambridge itself, which is a proper big city with a lot of traffic problems. Oh dear!

One of the nice things today is to see a lot of old photos of Peter and Jill going back to their wedding in 1985, which I, together with my late sister Kathy and her husband-to-be Steve, flew from the US to attend. 

Happy days!!!!

Zzzzzzzz!!!!!