My father has died, getting the year off to a pretty poor start. Cancer of the throat and mouth. I suppose it’s better than foot and mouth, and certainly much easier to explain. It was fast, mercifully for him but less so for me. 

As his immune system shut down his skin started to fall off, turning him as scarlet as a dipsomaniac vicar asleep at a cricket match. Sleeping more and more, babbling incoherently and eating only soup – a dish my mother never learned to master despite its dazzling simplicity – leaving a house full of morphine and a hell of a lot to sort out.

The end inevitably came with a fall, easy to do with a tumbler of scotch in one hand and a pipe in the other. Unable to steady himself on any available surface he toppled and broke his pelvis. I sit with him in the hospital and talk with him despite the fact that he’s asleep, his breathing so shallow that I think he’s already gone, his profile a Venetian plague mask replete with enormous nose.

The rest as they say is history, although I miss the old bugger immensely and it doesn’t help that I see him every time I look in a mirror.

Old Griffiths the undertaker looks tanned as he walks before the hearse in his topper. He has a house in Tenerife, Robert says, I thought it might be Marbella, after the amount I’ve paid him – knowing he’s handled both my mother and aunt this year – perhaps handled isn’t the right word.

You look like your father, one of his decrepit friends says outside the church. 

He lives on through you, says another as I wonder if I should contact an exorcist. 

Despite the early March weather, I’m warm in my old Gieves and Hawkes suit, thankful that I had the funeral director dress my father in a robe, prior to closing the coffin lid. I guess I preferred the thought of him journeying to the afterlife dressed as Noel Coward rather than Maurice Chevalier.

Philip is taking charge of the service, a big hearty priest with a magnificent voice, disappointed not to be able to raise the roof due to my father’s aversion to hymns. We have readings instead, my three boys and I. Those were very nice Philip says, most people have something from the Lion King. 

Everyone is dressed in their best bombazine black – funerals are their only invitations these days – and there’s free food and drink. I bump into the local MP in the gents – we both wash our hands before shaking – who speaks highly of my late father. He spoke highly of you too, I say in return, lying through my teeth which I hope are free of vol au vents.

The hotel is full of familiar faces from childhood, uncles, aunts – people I called uncles and aunts who were not related – yeomen, yokels, rotarians and freemasons, members of my fathers club, and the choir who will have been mortally wounded by their inability to sing.

David has my boys cornered and is regaling them with his poetry. I had considered him for the eulogy but services are around forty five minutes in duration and he would be just warming up by then. I must rescue my boys.

He’s so like his father, Alice says. It’s almost as if he’s standing here now, and I wish he were, rather than me. 

The VOR drives us home, decanting our boys at the railway station for their journey back to different parts of London, we kiss them and thank them for coming.

I stay up late, still in my suit, raising a glass to my father with his own scotch. I guess people aren’t dead if you don’t want them to be.