Not a great day

Today my parents and I went the funeral of one of my uncles, who died relatively unexpectedly last Friday. As could be expected considering his background, the funeral service was on the churchy side, not my cup of tea but it suited him. Much less personal than is probably the norm today but the vicar did well in linking his life with the readings chosen for the service. It all left me a bit maudlin and wondering what my own funeral would be like. Everybody has that don’t they, these worries about whether anybody would actually turn up and what will be said about you?

What made this day so bad wasn’t the funeral but the trip to it. It should have taken two hours or so with the train, from Amsterdam to the wild woolly East of the country, with a couple of changeovers, but it took almost four. We left more than an hour and a half earlier than we needed to yet still couldn’t make the start of the service. A power failure twenty minutes out from Amsterdam meant our train had to turn back, we had to travel over Utrecht to Amersfoort instead of going there directly and because the changeover in Utrecht had only a margin of one minute (and our train was five minutes late anyway) which meant another half hour delay on top of the more than an hour already suffered. Bye bye margin of error…