annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary

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Funerals and festivals

Saturday, yawn. I need to sort out a thing to do on Saturdays, an empty day with no plans fills me with horror and sends my brain into hyperdrive with so many possibilities that I’m totally immobilized. But I did OK today, wrote a list before I went to bed, then slept through till midday so there wasn’t much to worry about.
I had a chat the other day with my pal who runs the kids’ field at Glasto about this year, whether or not I’ll be up for doing it. Before I got that far into the conversation he said, “Listen. I have to say that my first responsibility is to give kids the best festival experience I can, not to hand out free festival passes to my old mates. It’s hard and tiring, you have to decide whether you can do it.” Well. How rude. I mean, obviously he’s right, but I don’t feel at all ready to pack away my tent and I have a big box of materials for workshops that need using up. I told him I’d taken up HIIT classes but he’d clearly never heard of them. I asked him to give me till the end of Feb to see if I’m fit enough but he didn’t sound convinced. Meh.
There’s a podcast I like with Kathy Burke talking to people about how they’d like to die and what kind of funeral they’d choose. Quite light-hearted and silly but I like a bit of death-related chat these days. They have an extra bit which you have to subscribe to, where listeners can email their funny stories about death and funerals and it had me thinking about it – I do have a range of funeral stories, not exactly hilarious, but they amuse me.
My friend Joan died just before I started blogging. We’d met at Uni, in our first week, both mature students, and just hit it off at once. Both feminists, we used to chat about that all day and on the phone all night, including about awful relationships we’d had. She’d been unhappily married twice and had also had a long relationship with a bloke in Denmark who insisted she had to move there, which she wouldn’t and didn’t. We had another friend, MC, who was living with a truly horrible man, Nick, who used what’s now called coercive control to have her doing what he wanted. We hated him, me and Joan. When Joan died Nick announced that he’d written a poem about her that he wanted to read at her funeral. Fucking hell. There was no stopping him as we were all a bit scared of him and MC couldn’t face the consequences of standing up to him. . It was an awful poem, revealing how little he knew Joan, but he read it, then fucked off. MC and I were in the same car going from the crem to the wake and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry about what Joan would have thought about fucking Nick reading at her funeral, till we realised that travelling in the car in front were not only both Joan’s ex-husbands but also fucking Jim from Denmark, at which point we did both laugh and cry because what else could we do - all these awful men taking the day off work, and travelling miles to pay tribute to a woman who despised them, and we couldn’t even tell her about it.

12:16 a.m. - 07.01.24

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