Its different for us plebs. My poor old dad died at 3pm on a Wednesday and was buried 10.30 on the Friday, almost 2 days later. I’d suggested taking him up to Edinburgh, but ‘he wouldn’t have wanted that’. Having no connection to that City whatsoever. And, to be honest, I don’t think that many Scotsmen would have filed passed to pay their respects, however worthy he was. Then he’d have to be flown back to London, hearsed round the East End for a bit, like some latter-day Kray, and then taken ‘home’ to lie in state (and not a very pleasant state, if you think about it), until the funeral. They did ask me, the Home Office, if I wanted the day of dad’s interment to be a bank holiday, but ‘he wouldn’t have wanted that’. Because he’d have known that the last thing we need here, in our nation on its knees with economic woes, deep in debt and underperforming on all levels, is another day of zero productivity, cancelled medical procedures and excessive drinking by the majority of the population.

So we all attribute things to the deceased pretty much to suit us. I’m supposed to say prayers every night for a year. But I don’t. Because my dad really ‘wouldn’t have wanted that’. Almost as much as I really don’t want that. But there’s the positive version too. When the assholes at in English football unilaterally decided to cancel a weekend’s games, everyone stated how Her Maj loved sport, how she would have loved the matches to go on. It becomes very difficult to second guess a person who can no longer make the first guess. Almost unfair. So we guess for them, on the basis that ‘they’d have wanted that’.

Thus: would either my dad, or Her Majesty of blessed memory and many jewels, have wanted me to stand in line along the south side of the River, for 37 hours in the pouring rain, just for the totally historic, once in a generational chance to… spend my allotted 8 seconds looking at a wooden box through a window whilst being jostled by a school group from Cleethorpes and a tour party from Gdansk? I don’t really think anyone would want that at all.

Happy Mourning Wednesday

A xxxx