NO more relationships with 'girls next door'!; - after TWO in the 'Priory Street Posse'!

My Father took my Sister and I later than planned to
Crawley’s Surrey and Sussex Crematorium, arriving at about
3pm to find about 70 other guests already there for the service
at 3.15-3.45. Various cousins on my Father’s side said hello
that I hardly recognised, I had not seen them since my cousin
Nick’s funeral about fifteen years earlier – so I had forgotten
some of the names, even. Family friends were there too –
mostly my Mum’s as my Father has no real friends of his own.
I circulated as best as I could before the service. ‘All things
bright and beautiful’ started it – which was at the request of
Jem’s kids, the minister said, a Baptist minister from their
village. Then Professor of Music at Hertfordshire University
Howard Burrell paid a five minute tribute to Mum. After a Dr
Chris Tye, also of the University, read Psalm 90, the minister
discussed it, the inevitable ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ led to
closing prayers – and the curtain closed silently and
automatically around the coffin and family only flowers – the
guests had been asked to donate to cancer charities. The tears
especially among our families’ children peaked as the curtain
closed on Mum for the last time.
Then back to Jem’s house for what was billed as not a
sombre reception by the family who organised this – Dad, Jem
and Libby – but a ‘celebration of Mum’s life’ which Dad opened
by changing his black tie for a pale blue one and reciting a ten
minute speech. Then there was far too much food and drink as
ever for a Lee ‘party’ – even on this which should have been
and in fact generally turned out to be – a sombre occasion. In
the next two hours until all the guests had had a meal and a
drink and made their goodbyes, I was struck intensely by how
nobody apart from my daughter came up to talk to me. They
had all been told my parents’ version – how they got me
through ‘intense illness’ very bravely – and as a result I am
now the ‘black sheep’ of the family – the only possible reason
why I was totally shunned and ignored at this party!
My daughter Jeni was just about the only exception to this
‘outsider’ business and she had been dropped off by Rodney
and her mother that morning, who picked us up and took us
both home about 7pm that evening. They were discussing in
the fat Jaguar car the A Levels she should start studying the
next day, Tuesday. I was, as Jeni’s father, yet again left a total
‘outsider’ in this discussion, so important when as a potential
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