John

“I’ve been particularly struck. Partly because of my age, I’ve known an awful lot of people who’ve been involved with funerals that they couldn’t do properly. In fact, I’ve been recently at quite a number of memorial events held, you know, just in the last few months for people who died a year or more ago.

We had one of our neighbours, sadly, who had a daughter in her thirties I think, who died during the pandemic. And of course, we weren’t able to go anywhere. There was no big funeral or anything, but it was fascinating that all the people in the road knew about it, and when the hearse came, and so on, everybody in the road came out. It reminded me of my childhood in Liverpool, because that’s what used to happen there, but it’s the only occasion I’ve seen a whole road coming out to honour somebody like that. And that was really quite special.”