Headachesville

Took the day off work today to attend the funeral of a close friends mother who we all loved as if she were our own.

The family have taken the bereavement quite hard and so it was nice to see almost all of our gang turn up to support our friends, a bit like an episode of that 30-something programme that used to be on, except that when we watched it we all were 30-something and now we are all 50 this year.

The funeral was at 10.20 and we all gathered at the house afterwards and had coffee and sandwiches and talked for a bit and our friend started to come out of the shell of despondancy that he had wrapped around himself for the past ten days and when people started to drift back to work at around lunchtime he asked if anyone fancied a beer.

To cut a long story short a few of us sat with him and his dad all afternoon in the hot sun, in our funeral suits, drinking his beer in his back garden and now at 7.30pm I'm sitting at home with a sunburnt head and a monster headache which I'm hoping (in vain) two paracetamols and two mugs (so far) of black coffee will shift.

He was much happier when we left him though so it should all have been worth while, and we enjoyed the beer too.

Its a really great achievement in life if you can point to a group of people and say out loud, "those are my close friends" and then lean on them when it matters.