Funeral's Eve

I've come to London to attend a funeral. It is Wednesday evening and the city is rumbling in its usual way. It's stranger than I expected to be here, to be visiting for him without him. This place never felt like home, but a root of my family tree is undeniably here, or was, or is.

For old times sake I take the tube to London Bridge in search of an appetite, but find only an M&S sandwich. Doubling back to Blackfriars my clogs clatter noisily against the metal treads of the steps.

My funeral coat smells strongly of damp. It's been a while since anyone died. The oil stained pockets almost the only indication that this coat has ever been anything other than respectable, I fiddle with the screw which once failed to hold my moped together - almost.

It's half past Nunhead. I find this city confusing, too loud, too much, two friends board and fill the doorway with chattering laughter. My brain strains to hear familiar place names, Beckenham will do - I think we came here to buy a tyre once.

In my head I try to think of a satisfactory conclusion to the eulogy in my rucksack, outside the window buses rest under the bright lights of a depot. Shortlands is our next stop and on the platform a man enquires "Is this the way to Amerillo", I wouldn't know, I've never been this way before, but Blyth Road is marked with the familiar green signs of the Borough of Bromley. Not home, but here.

Bloody well right

It’s (give or take a couple of days) 20 years since I started secondary school. It’s funny to think just how much of an impact those following five years have had on my life – how much was set in motion there.

There is another trouser leg of time where I didn’t apply for Archbishop’s and went to Fulford instead. Maybe I didn’t lose my religious faith in an RE classroom and instead became a vicar, maybe I didn’t fall for engineering and did history, I almost certainly wouldn’t have landed up at York College when I did. And from wherever there was, did I still apply for Lancaster? Meet my wife? After 20 years did that Edward write a similar post, and did you read it?

But out of the subjunctive bifurcation and back to the trouser leg of reality, the things which did happen and which still echo through my life now. I still use trigonometry quite a lot, I’ve had less use out of knowledge of the essential parts of a Sikh Gurdwara, sometimes I still feel pangs of shame about being queer. I found a love for engineering, I learnt how to spot when someone was lying when they said “I’m fine”, I learnt how to sit very still on a hard chair whilst the word “outstanding” was repeated several times from the lectern at the front of the hall without giggling or farting. I learnt how to cut the pleasure out of poetry, but also how to sew joy into learning, and then - there’s the music.

I am not a good musician, I am too ill disciplined apart from anything else, but for hours a week I was allowed to cause (mostly) tuneful chaos. Orchestra, choir, and (best of all) soul band. I don’t think I realised how lucky I was at the time - not just that the opportunities to make music were there, but that a clown like me was allowed to make the most of them. My career was perhaps inevitable (that I am a railway engineer does not surprise my primary school teachers) – even if the path could have taken some different turns on the way - but I wonder what my life would have been like without that bit of my musical journey. Would I have found that joy on my own? If access to music had been restricted only to those with the discipline to do grades, would I have bothered? (The answer there, I can say with some certainty, is no). It would be trite to say that music has saved my life, but over the years through singing in choirs it’s brought me friendship and comfort through some of the very darkest nights – and even when it’s not been my redemption it’s brought joy and light.

And so 20 years on, a couple of feet taller, with a wife and a child and a job that I love, I look back on those first few days of that short five years and feel terribly lucky that that’s the choice I made, and even luckier that all the people (staff and pupils) made that choice a happy one. Today I will go to choir, tomorrow I will go to work with a smile, on Wednesdays we wear pink. School, what a concept.