Alamo Heights Bike Tosser

No idea, but I guess this is what someone else's lousy day looked like.

It's already a lousy day, not least because we're in the middle of a global pandemic. Happily the pandemic hasn't made a great deal of difference to me, thus facilitating my irritation by inconveniences of lesser consequence.

The Lulu website through which I self-publish all sorts of things has had an upgrade, meaning that it no longer works and keeps forgetting my password. All morning I listen to my wife verbally wrestling with fellow programmers over an internet connection, now that she works from home, at least a couple of whom seem to know less about coding a webpage than I do. One of them routinely sets aside his designated tasks so as to concentrate on removing accidentally placed double spaces from lines of programming code, despite that a double space makes no difference to what the likes of you or I will eventually see on our screens. On other days he dedicates himself to highlighting different parts of code in different colours, supposedly for future reference by somebody or other, and my wife ends up having to finish off the work he was actually supposed to be doing. I've a feeling that the Lulu upgrade may have been coded by persons such as this. It doesn't work and half of the regular features are missing, but it looks like the British Airways site, and apparently that's what we really wanted all along.

Additionally, it's hot and windy out, which is a weird combination, and my ingrowing toenail - which has been fine since I was about sixteen - is playing up.

Anyway, I head out on my bike. Today I'm going to cycle to Bike World over on Broadway before I hit the trail. I've had the same tyres for a year, and the back one is bald, having covered something like five-thousand miles. I've already tried to purchase replacement tyres from Bike World, but they only had an ostentatious racing tyre in my size; so I'm trying again, and this time I'll simply ask them to order the fuckers if they don't have anything in stock. I'm trying to avoid using Amazon. I'm trying to support local business.

It's half past eleven in the morning and Bike World doesn't open until twelve, at which point they will allow just four people in the store at any one time. I lock up my bike and cross the road to Bird's Bakery, looking to get something to eat and to use up some time.

I examine the menu on the table set up outside. A woman comes out to take my order.

'I'll take a chicken sandwich,' I tell her.

She takes my card and goes back inside, then returns a couple of minutes later. 'I just figured I should let you know before I swipe your card, it will take about a quarter of an hour.'

'Fifteen minutes?'

'Yes.'

I look at my watch. I look at Bike World across the road, still shut. By the time the sandwich is ready, the store will be open, thus negating the entire fucking point of my buying the sandwich.

'Okay,' I sigh. 'Never mind.'

I wander up the road to the meat market but it doesn't seem like the sort of place which is likely to sell anything snacky.

I return to Bike World, and to three others who have arrived to wait in my absence, a young couple and an Alamo Heights Bike Tosser, a middle aged man who looks as though he's no stranger to the golf course and who regards himself as a better standard of person. He stands there with his mountain bike. I walk in front of him, pointedly unlock my own bike, then wheel it around so that I am now stood behind him.

'Sir,' says the younger guy who is here with his girlfriend, 'you were before us.' He gestures for me to come to the front of the queue.

'It's okay,' I say. 'There are four of us, and I don't mind so long as I don't end up waiting outside once they open.'

We all stand there for another few minutes.

The door opens and a bike dude emerges. He sees myself and  Alamo Heights Bike Tosser stood with our bikes. 'If you guys need repairs, you'll have to go to the double doors around the back.'

'I just need tyres,' I say.

Alamo Heights Bike Tosser says something which suggests that he has indeed brought his bike in for repair.

We wheel our bikes around to the back of the building, to the double doors as instructed. Because I was at the end of the queue, I am now first to get to the double doors, so I knock.

After another moment, the door opens and another bike dude pops his head out. He looks at me. 'Okay, how can we help?'

I look to Alamo Heights Bike Tosser. 'Didn't you need your bike taken in to the shop? Maybe if you're just getting it taken in…'

This is me being polite, having - so it turns out - misread the guy's needs. It's already been established that I was here first, so I hardly need to rub it in his face.

'Yeah,' he says to the Bike World guy, 'I'm going to need tubes and tyres, plus a rack too,' and off he goes with a list of all the stuff he intends to purchase. It seems that he's replacing everything on his bike except the frame.

The double doors close as the Bike World guy goes inside with Alamo Heights Bike Tosser's bike and long, long list of requirements.

We stand there in silence for a minute or two.

'Hell of a way to run a business,' says Alamo Heights Bike Tosser as though we're all in this together.

I wait another minute.

'Fuck it,' I say, walking off with my bike. 'I'll come back some other time, maybe when there are a few less cunts who want to go in front of me because they're more fucking important than I am.'

I say it loud so as to ensure that he will hear, and I take pleasure in doing so. My objection is poorly constructed, I know, but hopefully conveys just how much I dislike the man.

I cycle home. I was going to head out onto the trail but it's too hot and I'm too pissed off.

A Rightie History of the World

First of all the universe was created, and most scientists think it was probably made by God because He also made the world. Steven Hawkins had an alternative theory called the Big Bang, named after the hilarious TV show about nerds, probably because Hawkins thought it was a documentary. While Hawkins' argument may appear convincing if you can actually understand any of it, his credentials are suspect, mostly being a list of egghead universities, a list from which the University of Life is conspicuously absent; so it's not difficult to see that he was one of those people who can tell you the square root of seventeen but wouldn't know where to start if you asked him to make a cup of tea. Such people, unable to hold down an honest job on the buses or at a railway station or whatever, tend to invent jobs for themselves by making things up and convincing the rest of us that we should pay them for it. Hawkins was therefore essentially a scrounger who didn't know anything like so much as he claimed, which is why he had the idea of explaining something we already knew, and for which we didn't really need an explanation. Maybe somebody should have told him about the Bible.

Mind you, the sort of people who used to hang out with Steven Hawkins are mostly the same people who say they don't believe in God; but if He wasn't real, why the fuck would it say that He was in the Bible? The problem with these people is that they don't understand basic logic. I'm sure it's very nice sitting around in a laboratory all day inventing theories which don't make any difference to anyone, but some of us require a bit more rigour to our thoughts before we'll believe just any old thing.

God is probably also known as Odin and is definitely a white man. That isn't being racist or nothing. In fact it's probably racist to say that he's not a white man because we've all seen the paintings of him, but it's fashionable to be too sensitive about such things these days. Bob Marley wrote a song about it called One Love which was about people being too sensitive. I've got all of Bob Marley's wonderful albums. I've even got a few of his films on DVD. I'm sure that will surprise some of the more sensitive members of the community.

Anyway, after God made the world, there were the dinosaurs but they didn't last very long. They just died out for no reason. Scientists believe that this happens a lot, just as it's happening right now. Global warming happens every few years and it's normal. You probably remember a few really hot summers when you were a kid. Well, that was global warming. It's normal and there's nothing we can do about it. In fact, if we did something about it, there would be a lot of job losses, hence a lot more scroungers sitting around waiting for a hand out, and probably a lot more people like Steven Hawkins inventing theories about stuff we already understand just fine. Isn't socialism wonderful!

Once the dinosaurs went, aliens made pyramids so that the monkeys which God was turning into humans had somewhere to live. Some of those monkeys probably became the Illuminati, which is a secretive club of socialists who run the world and who are responsible for all the bad stuff that happens, like climate protesters, abortion clinics, and crooked Hillary's emails. Aliens made the pyramids because the monkeys weren't yet quite smart enough to do it for themselves because they hadn't evolved into white people, and some people are still like that - not mentioning no names or nothing - which is why they need the government to do everything for them. But some people watched the aliens making the pyramids and so they learned something and became a bit more intelligent, which is probably about when Jesus was born. Jesus was a great entrepreneur who showed beggars how to pick up their beds and carry them. The Bible tells us that the Romans crucified him but scientists believe that Jesus was actually a very good citizen and certainly law-abiding, so it doesn't seem very likely. More probable is that it was a certain socialist element working behind the scenes, perhaps in concert with a certain ethnic group who were quite popular back then and whose name is today synonymous with international banking and the entertainment industry which is corrupting the minds of our children, but who I'm not allowed to name under the conditions of the current socialist dictatorship due to a law called political correctness which the Illuminati want to add to our precious Constitution. So Jesus was one of the good guys, and he was murdered, and all I'm saying is that I'm not in a hurry to listen to any more songs by Paul Simon. Like I say, I happen to prefer the music of a coloured man called Bob Marley. In fact I can hardly wait to hear his new album.

The dark ages followed the death of Jesus and nothing is known about this time right up until Christopher Colombus discovered America, a miraculous unpopulated paradise which he found by accident when he was sailing to Japan. That's how we have the Constitution.

Next came the Second World War which was started by Joseph Stalin, a conflict which drew both the United States and Germany into the arena. At the time Germany was ruled by Hitler who, although he is not fondly remembered by history, had some very interesting ideas and wasn't afraid to say what he was thinking. It was a long and terrible war which lasted for thirty years or more, although there were some very good people on both sides. Once we won, Hitler sent us his rocket scientists as thanks for helping him out and freeing the German people. That's how we went to the moon, or at least tried, but we didn't manage it because of socialism and the unions demanding unreasonably higher pay rates for astronauts, which is why our greatest president had to invent Star Fleet, thus fulfilling the prophecy made by Gene Roddenberry, so we could properly go to the moon instead of just pretending so as not to offend certain over-sensitive elements who had infiltrated our government.

So that's the history of our world. There were a few other things which happened here and there - like when David Duke freed the slaves, for example - but unfortunately nobody really knows anything about that other stuff so it probably doesn't matter much.

I shouldn't have to write this, but here we are: the above comprises an ingenious blend of sarcasm and complete bullshit. If you're one of the few who made it all the way to the end without realising, you need to (a) stop voting immediately, (b) remove those political campaign signs from your lawn and your vehicle, and (c) go back to school, probably restarting at first grade just to be on the safe side, and this time, try paying some fucking attention, yeah?

Thanks to Baniel for the picture.

Everyday People

The people we recognise without really knowing form the living furniture of existence, or possibly the background noise. It's strange when they're gone because we often hadn't even realised they were ever there. Back in the late nineties, now over two decades past, I delivered mail to Tarbert Road, East Dulwich. More recently, at least within the last couple of years, I had reason to walk down Tarbert Road on the way to somewhere or other while visiting England. It was weirdly nostalgic, and particularly so when I spotted a particular blonde man with glasses and a pony tail. I couldn't remember the name but he lived in an upstairs flat on the even side of the road with his wife and a small child. He was someone I'd once spoken to almost daily for a couple of years, and I hadn't even noticed his having gone missing from my routine. He said he didn't really remember me but that I looked familiar.

I find this kind of detail fascinating, namely the stuff which doesn't quite mean anything you can describe.

The faces I now see regularly in terms of familiar people I don't actually know are mostly cyclists, runners, or persons out walking on the Tobin Trail, a public greenway which forms an almost complete circuit around the city of San Antonio. I cycle twenty miles of it every day to McAllister Park and back and these are the people I see.

Asian Friend. For a while Bess regularly ran around our neighbourhood and so built up her own pantheon of persons regularly seen but not actually known, one of whom she referred to as Asian Friend, because the woman was of Asian extraction and they would usually wave to each other. For a while we assumed that our respective Asian Friends were one and the same but it has since emerged that the one I usually see is a bit older and has the look of having had a facelift at some point.

Book Bloke. He always walks along reading a thick hardback, walking slowly so as not to fall over, I guess. I've never been able to tell what the books are, but hopefully the Bible isn't one of them.

Crap Writer. He read his slightly lurid spy thrillers at some writer's group I attended, and then suddenly I realised it's the very same guy I saw out walking with his ancient parents more or less every day. The spy thrillers mostly seemed to concentrate on our hero meeting ladies and then engaging in acts of which I suspect the author may not have had much direct experience, if any at all. I said hello a couple of times, then stopped bothering because he never returned the greeting and seemed embarrassed to see me; which is fine because frankly he struck me as a bit of a wanker. I haven't actually seen him in years now, so maybe his career took off and his exciting spy thrillers sell by the truckload. That's probably what happened.

Fruity Grandmother. I say grandmother, but she's probably my age, or maybe younger. She has pigtails, little round sixties spectacles, and wears a variety of self-consciously eccentric t-shirts, one of which is something to do with having loads of cats, so I'm sure she's all right. The fruity quality, as expressed in the occasional cheery greeting, is probably down to my imagination as formed during all those years of being a postman; besides which, I'm very happily married and intend to stay that way.

Granny Racer. He's a young dude, skinny but muscular and bald, and he runs, but runs while pushing a very old lady in a wheelchair, possibly his mother. She's on the small side and can't weigh much, but it's still quite impressive to watch. I usually find those who engage in ostentatiously weird forms of exercise a bit obnoxious, but I like this guy, and his mother is obviously having a whale of a time into the bargain.

My Indian Girlfriend. This is actually the name by which Bess refers to her, which is hilarious, obviously. We first got talking when she flagged me down and delivered a slightly garbled testimony about a doggie seen roaming free at the Tobin Park Trailhead. I wasn't really in the business of rescuing stray dogs, but I guess she needed to tell someone. As it turned out, I did actually happen to know of people who were in the business of rescuing stray dogs so we got there in the end. I usually stop and talk to my Indian Girlfriend whenever I see her, which is usually every few weeks, because otherwise I don't actually have a social life and I miss hearing English spoken with an Indian accent. We talk about pets, because she's been following the saga of our neighbour and the fence we've had built to keep him out, and we talk about the president, because neither of us like him very much and I think she feels the need to vent. Actually, I don't think she's too crazy about white people in general, which is understandable.

Obelix and his mate. Middle-aged, handlebar moustache, fat with a skinnier friend, they're always cycling together, usually side by side making it awkward to pass them when I've been coming from the other direction; and always yacking away which is why they absolutely must cycle side by side. They used to get on my tits for this reason, along with my nodded greetings going unacknowledged on a couple of occasions, but then I once almost crashed into the fat one whilst combining cycling with rocking out to a Henry Rollins CD, the embarrassment of which seems to have levelled the previously uneven surface of our communal etiquette landscape, or whatever you would call it. So these days we vaguely acknowledge each other as we pass, plus I think we had a conversation about a large puddle of water at some point, so that broke the ice a bit.

Raggety. As with many of these individuals, I don't know their actual names and have therefore given them ones suggested by my own subconscious, as one tends to do without really thinking about it; which is why some of the names may seem a little cruel, not least being this one. Raggety was originally a wood troll associated with Rupert Bear, a slightly disturbing supernatural figure of disheveled appearance. Back at school, my friend Pete once referred to Rose Wilson by the name Raggety because she was small with a slightly rustic quality, which I thought was perhaps a little cruel even at the time. Nevertheless my subconscious had no such qualms in transferring the label to this woman whom I've seen either running or cycling more or less every day since I moved here. Of late she's taken on a striking and unexpected resemblance to seventies Woody Allen, but I think I'll stick with Raggety for the sake of consistency. She's small, even child size, resembling both Rose and Rupert Bear's nemesis, and is possibly of indigenous lineage. I've waved and said hello on numerous occasions to no avail, and yet have found her both chatty and personable when there's been some passing reason for conversation. She has a strong Texas accent and is definitely from around here, unlike myself. She seems like a reassuring presence, and I like people who understand that nothing need be said when there's nothing to say.

Responsible Medical Father. He's usually wearing scrubs, so I guess he might work at Northeast Baptist, and he's always walking with his kid, who clearly has some fairly severe physical disability and is in a motorised wheelchair. I wave, they wave back, or at least the father does, and they always seem happy. Also, I see them more or less every day, suggesting there's some actual proper fathering going on, which is nice to know in his shitty old world. We could use more dads like this guy.

Santa. Always walking, big white beard, and always called out good job whenever I passed him on my bike, usually as thanks for my having already called out so as to alert him of my intention to pass. Come to think of it, I haven't actually seen Santa in a while, which is particularly worrying as it's not even Christmas.

Skeeter. The name only just came to me now as I realised my subconscious was yet to tag this gentleman with a convenient if slightly insulting label. He looks unusually Texan, as though he knows how to fix a truck. If he isn't actually called Skeeter, he's probably related to someone who is; but he's all right by me. We once had a conversation about an owl, and a conversation which didn't end up with his assuming I'm Australian, so that works for me. If there's any sort of organising force in the universe, I suspect it may have provided Skeeter for the purpose of filling the ecological niche recently vacated by Santa.

Tim. So called because that's actually his name. He vaguely knows my wife's friend Andrea from when they both used to eat at La Fonda. One day my wife joined her friend for lunch and Tim happened to be there. He explained that he cycled on the Tobin Trail almost every day, and Bess said that he should look out for me, and that he would recognise me by my hat, so now we wave at each other whenever we pass. 'Hey, Lawrence,' he calls out. 'Hello, Tim,' I usually say in response. Movie rights to this story are still available if anyone's interested.

Withered Leg Man. Always on his bike, head to toe in lycra, and always racing. Ordinarily I wouldn't have noticed him amongst all of the other Alamo Heights bike tossers who clog up the trail with their ostentatiously weird and expensive cycles, recumbent or otherwise, five wheels and tractor tyres but no seat, requiring that one mounts by lowering one's bumhole onto the ergonomic pilot buttplug. Withered Leg Man has one withered leg, as the name implies, with seemingly normal bone structure supporting hardly any muscle. I'm genuinely impressed by his triumph over apparent adversity.

Wossername. Small, Hispanic, always walking her dog. My Indian girlfriend told me her name but I can't remember it. Apparently she doesn't really care much for white people either. This is probably why she's just sort of looked at me on the couple of occasions of my having said, good morning.

A Day in the Life of the Global Pandemic

Somewhere there will be a diary kept during the second world war in which the average entry reads, still no oranges in the shops, think I might go for a walk a bit later. The current coronavirus pandemic arguably constitutes the single event to have the greatest, most tangible impact on humanity since the second world war, and I've suddenly noticed how dull my own nightly diary entries seem, or at least how potentially dull they will most likely seem to future generations, assuming there are any; Thursday the 2nd of April, for example:

I managed to cycle twenty miles just before the rain set in. Apparently we have five or six days of rain, so that may be my cycling for the week. I guess we'll see. Bess sewed masks. I wrote and edited an MP3 of Bukowski*. We got a take out from Shake Shack yet again, but somehow it wasn't as good. Eddie of Little & Large snuffed it. This is the first pandemic where I've noticed celebrities dying. Having finished The Wire, we watched the first of season three of Ozark. I'm afraid I found it a bit incomprehensible.

Unfortunately for the sake of both dramatic tension and future warnings from history, our current global pandemic hasn't made a whole lot of difference to me. I was never particularly social, so the main points of adjustment have been 1) that my steady mail order supply of eighties comic books has temporarily dried up, 2) that Bess and myself are no longer able to dine out, as we would ordinarily do on Thursdays and Saturdays, and 3) that I have to wear a mask.

Additionally, Bess has been working from home since January, the company having decided to save money on costly office space; and the boy now attends virtual school conducted through the internet at his grandmother's house, and specifically at his grandmother's house because she used to be a school teacher and is as such qualified to apply scholastic pressure when necessary. Bess has also been making face masks, averaging around one-hundred a day, giving them away to whoever should need them, requests from hospitals and nursing homes, that sort of thing. I tried one but the elastic hurt my ears after a while, so instead I cover my face with a bandana, which is more comfortable and hopefully implies gang affiliation, or at least that I'm no stranger to narcocorrido music - anything to keep idiots at a distance, not due to any specific fear of coronavirus, but mostly because I dislike idiots. I'm surprised we haven't seen more convenience store robberies given that it's now possible to wear a mask in broad daylight without anyone giving you a second glance.

I've still been cycling to McAllister Park each day, at least during the week, a round trip of twenty miles which doesn't really bring me into close contact with anyone.

Shopping hasn't been much of a problem given that our household gets through toilet paper at a fairly average rate, and we've seen no need to stockpile four-million additional rolls in the garage. The boy, as he approaches seventeen, seems to be turning into Zippy the Pinhead, exhibiting a peculiar fixation with television advertising while favouring a diet of instant crap which the rest of us tend to avoid unless it's the end of the world and that's all we have left in our bunker - Ramen noodles, Kraft Mac & Cheese, and so on. These have been in short supply, but he's managed somehow. There was one strange week where no-one had any onions, but luckily I had a few already in the fridge. This is as close as I've come to hoarding.

There has so far been one day on which I had to queue for five minutes before being allowed into the local supermarket, allowing them to keep the numbers down so as to facilitate social distancing. The most annoying aspect of this came next day when there was no queue. I asked the security guard if he wanted me to start a new queue, and I had to ask five fucking times before he understood. This turns out to be because Americans don't recognise queue as a word, instead preferring the verb to stand in line.

Now I only stand in line to wait for an available cashier, a practice implemented by the supermarket so as to prevent us all squashed up and breathing on each other in the vicinity of the tills. It's hardly a massive inconvenience, aside from the awkward eventuality of finding myself directed to tills I would ordinarily avoid, specifically the two worked by members of staff whom I've found disagreeable in the past. I was herded to the till worked by the woman with Karl Malden's nose only two days ago, for example. I stood six feet away from the woman then being served. Once she'd paid up, she walked away and I took her place.

'Sir,' said Karl Malden's nose lady, 'you have to stand at the end of the conveyor belt when I'm serving a customer.'

'Yes,' I said, 'that's why I was standing over there,' - I pointed - 'at the end of the conveyor belt when you were serving that woman who just left.'

Every time I've been to the till of Karl Malden's nose lady, there's always a problem. It's hard to not take it personally. On one occasion she kept all of my purchases at her end of the belt after scanning, with me stood at the other end twiddling my thumbs, unable to pack anything into my bag. I could only assume she thought I was going to do a runner.

Try telling that to those people who lived through the Holocaust.

The inconvenience of life during the global pandemic has been, to me, so barely significant as to be hardly worth mentioning - aside from here in the context of illustrating how little point there would be in mentioning it. Social distancing is easily achieved in our part of Texas. The death toll for Bexar county stands at twenty-four at the time of writing, more than half of those from the same nursing home on the south side. This is after a month of this thing, nearly a month of masks and closed diners and all the other measures, a month during which other counties and other states have been hit much, much worse. Prophets of online doom inevitably predict that one morning we'll wake up in a scene from 28 Days Later which will somehow serve us right, but I'm so accustomed to the barrage of fear that I've stopped noticing it, and have instead continued to worry about more immediately tangible problems such as how long it will be before I can resume buying up all those back issues of Alpha Flight.

I know this thing is terrible, and that it's real, and yes I'm taking it absolutely seriously; but at the end of the day - as the footballing cliché goes - it's not actually bubonic plague. For once I'm lucky enough to be in a position where a global catastrophe isn't having much direct or immediate effect on me; and having once spent at least twenty years of my life at the mercy of Darwinian economics and accordingly shitting myself as to what tomorrow might bring on an at least weekly basis, it's quite nice to have nothing much worth writing about in my dairy. I'm fairly sure there were plenty of people already leading miserable existences before we all had to start wearing masks, but apparently it's only the end of the world when it impacts upon people who've worked hard, paid their mortgages, and who therefore deserve better.

*: For the sake of clarity, this sentence aspires to report that I engaged in writing in addition to editing a sound file of a reading by the poet, Charles Bukowski rather than describing a single undertaking.

Circus

It seems that coronavirus was actually more serious than I realised, but I'm still not allowing myself to be swept up in the gnashing and wailing because it's not going to make a difference. The cemetery people called our hostess and suggested she might like to postpone until after the apocalypse has passed. She told them that she was going ahead as planned, despite everyone who would have attended having let us know they'll be staying home. The deceased was cremated months ago, and this would have made more sense earlier in the year, but our hostess was determined to mount a spectacle for the benefit of one particular special guest; and now even she can't make it. We're therefore going to livestream the proceedings to her in Arizona.

We are stood in the cemetery in a small town some sixty miles south of San Antonio. The sky is grey and it's pouring with rain. There are five of us in attendance, just direct relatives and myself stood on the family plot wherein the mortal remains of my wife's ancestors are interred, going back more than a century. With us are three cemetery guys, two with shovels, stood around waiting for it to be over. A bright green strip of plastic grass is laid out to one side of the plot with five folding chairs. Our hostess sets her soundbar and smartphone upon one of the chairs as some Godawful Christian country number swells and gushes to fill the air to provide the emotion which it apparently believes we ourselves are incapable of producing. Our hostess has once again taken control of the situation, as she always does, and she has made it about her. This is her presentation to us, grimly delivered despite previous complaints about having to do everything herself while making sure that this is the only possible option and that our collective role is therefore reduced to that of audience. Maybe later we'll compare notes, compliment our hostess on how well she arranged everything on our behalf, knowing we would only have made a mess of it.

Aren't we fortunate in having her to do this sort of thing for us?

Junior is handed a smartphone and my wife sets up the livestream so that a woman in Arizona can watch us stood around a hole in the ground in the pissing rain. Our hostess waves her hands in dismissive gestures, testily confirming that no, she doesn't know how to set up a livestream. Does she really have to do everything?

She bids us sit, like an older sister playing with her siblings. She gets to be Dorothy and we have to do what she says. She leads us in prayer like a priest. We dutifully close our eyes and mumble through, mainly so as to get to the other side, to the point at which it's over.

Now we come to the remembrances, as we knew we would. She told us of her plans, her schedule, several weeks before. She told us how it was going to happen. She begins, delivering a lengthy monologue detailing what she remembers about the deceased, treasured memories, precious moments, and the fact that the dead woman had little time for the mawkish sentiment one associates with Hallmark greetings cards. This last detail is related without the slightest trace of irony. The monologue is mostly about our hostess.

'That's where my love of bling came from,' she explains happily, in conclusion to some observation or other. 'For me, the bling's the thing.' She pulls that face. Yes, she realises she's just a little bit kooky, but you know how it is, right?

Others share a few memories. After all, we are actually supposed to be here because someone has died. That was the original point. I decline because I don't know why anyone would think I might have anything useful to add. Our hostess remembers something else she wanted to share.

Roll Out the Barrel is played on the soundbar - the only song the deceased actually wanted played at her funeral. Somehow we've been spared further Christian country - probably due to the rain rather than any sudden realisation on the part of our Mistress of Ceremonies

The container with the ashes is placed in the hole. We each take a handful of rose petals from a heart-shaped basket and scatter them within. This detail was similarly announced a few weeks back, or maybe pitched might be a better term given our hostess's background in commerce and corporate presentation. I additionally take a handful of sandy dirt and drop it into the hole because it seems right to do something traditional, something which hasn't been choreographed.

My wife's grandmother has returned to the earth and the hole is filled. We get back in the car and drive home in the pouring rain, happy at least for the circus to be over.