longer.blue

A good friend of mine is an undertaker by profession. He comes highly recommended. If you’re looking to have somebody put in the ground, I mean. I mention this on account of today's little…kerfuffle. Good heavens. The stories he’s told me over the years. Enough to turn your hair white overnight. I should imagine you lot remember Ron Rapley? That lollipop man who was had up on multiple counts? He was my age. Lived with his mother, until she snuffed it, that is. Nothing wrong with living with your mother, by the way. Except…he kept his in the back bedroom for years after she passed on. I’m not sure that’s entirely…sanitary. He was a big fellow all his life. Mam told me, when he were a lad, he started out as a trainee greengrocer. He liked to squeeze the fruit. Evidently, he could crush a ripe plum in his fist until he could hand you the stone. Yeah. Juice everywhere, mind. He used to collect the stones, d’you remember? Peaches, nectarines, cherries, apricots, dates. Mam said he drew the line at seeds and pips, partly because he preferred the idea of something that was big enough to roll away from the mother tree in order to germinate, rather than escape and be released some miles away, in a squirt of fertiliser from some random bird’s back passage. This was his natural tendency, you see: gather up the children, nurture them, keep them close. Trouble was, he didn’t know his own strength. When an embrace becomes a grip, that’s when problems ensue. The local rag called him ‘the Cuddler’. Some folks said all he wanted was to be loved. I don’t think that accounts for the collection of kiddies’ shoes they found in his loft. He’d been dead a month when my undertaker pal got his hands on him. I saw the photographs. And the rest. Jesus wept. What a mess. Although I imagine you’re used to that sort of thing. Then there was that former lady mayoress. What was her name? Barbara, that’s it. Mam went to school with her. One minute she’s getting dolled up for the bingo - she loved a bit of bingo did Babs - the next she’s sparked out in the doorway of her outside toilet on account of a collapsed lung. Unconscious before she hit the ground, and dead by the time they got her out of the back of the ambulance. I mean, they wheeled her into the hospital, but it was a lost cause. She’d have been gutted to miss the bingo. That week it was the jackpot accumulator. So, they wheeled her out of the hospital, and that’s when my chum got his hands on her. I have to say, he did a lovely job. Set the features beautifully. She was the acme of ‘repose’. He once told me that being a funeral director was a bit like being a theatrical set designer. The audience only sees this wonderful recreation, but behind the scenes it’s all held together with gaffer tape. If you ask me, he’s more like a cross between a family butcher and flower arranger. That’s not a particularly flattering comparison is it. I always give him a pat on the back when I see his handiwork. Not everyone can turn a face frozen in that moment of death into, er, as I say, the ‘acme of repose’. You see, death doesn’t judge. Babs the former lady mayoress might have had her name above the front doors to the ward they were going to put her in if she’d lived, but all of the corpses leave through the side exit in an unmarked box. Doesn’t matter how important you are in life. Oops! Sorry. I digress. Here’s me prattling on about Ron and Babs like they were old friends of mine. That’s not what we’re here to talk about. Is it. I just thought you’d find it interesting, and…well…you know…relevant.