My pratty brother Jeremy - the one who isn't speaking to me, for reasons which I have never quite figured out, largely because who the hell cares? - has just sent my nice brother Tim the following email, which Tim has forwarded on to me and Penny:
The funeral is at [somewhere in Leatherhead] on Tuesday 27th March at 11.00 a.m.
James and Doreen’s phone number is [number] if you’d like to let them know you’re coming.
I expect you’ll want to let our sisters know the news, if you think they’ll be interested.
Good lord. Could the guy be any more of a dick?
You may note that there is a crucial item of information missing from that message. I have no idea who's dead. I assume it's either James's father or his mother. Not, one hopes, both, which would be, as per Oscar Wilde, careless.
At the risk of confirming Jeremy's unfavourable opinion, I'm afraid I can't say that I'm particularly bothered about this, other than in the most remote oh-that's-sad-but-he-was-in-his-80s-so ... sort of way. I saw my uncles and cousins maybe a couple of times a year when I was growing up, if that much, then at my sister's wedding in the early 1970s, and the surviving cousins (one of them had died In The Gutter in the interim, a fact of which I am obscurely proud) turned up at my dad's funeral in 2003. That's it. Bosom family they are not, in fact I have to stop and think which of the four cousins belongs to which of the two uncles, and which ones have died. I'll send them a sympathy card, of course, if anyone lets me know who I'm sympathising about and where to send it to, but I don't see us hacking over to Leatherhead to say goodbye to somebody I barely knew.
Maybe I'm hard-hearted and unnatural. Eh, well, too late to change now.
