Option 1 is possible but ill-advisable given the structural support provided to the house. Option 2 is also possible but income may be sporadic. Option 3 is possible but would squat on my life and crush my soul. Option 4 has proved to be impossible, and so I have decided to pursue that further.

August

Wednesday August 1st

Chandrima has suggested that all members of Poetry Club should read a poem at Douglas’s funeral tomorrow.

I sat on the garden bench with a dozen anthologies spread out in front of me, slowly reddening under the mid-day sun. It took me ages to find anything appropriate; most of the popular funeral poems seem overly morbid, maudlin or mawkish, and I’m not altogether sure that’s what he would have wanted.

I tried Kipling but couldn’t find anything quite right. In the end, I settled on Noel Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’. He would have enjoyed its comedy and redolence of colonialism.

Thursday August 2nd

Funeral Shoes (Stop all the Crocs)

Stop all the Crocs, cut out these foam clogs,

Don’t let your footwear go to the dogs,

Silence the pavements from the Crocs’ fearsome slap,

Bring out the dustbin, put your Crocs into that.

Let the easyJets gather and circle in glee

To write on the sky the words CROC: R.I.P.

Organise parties and grand cavalcades,

Host dinners, bake cakes, throw victory parades.

He was her North, her South, her West and East,

Her Mini-Milk, her Fab, her Chocolate Feast.

But such thoughts were all packed away in a box,

From the moment she saw him wearing Crocs.

Crocs are passé now: discard all your pairs;

Lob them onto the waves, recite a prayer.

Watch them drift out to where sea and sky meet,

And beg for forgiveness from your poor feet.

Douglas’s funeral was not well-attended. Poetry Club represented about half of those gathered together to say their farewells. But amongst the others assembled, much consideration had gone into providing him with the kind of send-off he would have wanted: there was a guard of honour; his coffin was draped in the Union Jack; the ‘Last Post’ was bugled. And then it was the turn of Poetry Club with our selections: Rossetti, Dickinson, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Wordsworth. Toby Salt read an extract from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, in its original Chinese.

We walked across the road together to the pub. As Toby Salt’s footsteps clacked behind me, my loathing of him reached new levels. I was munching on a cheese sandwich and wondering what kind of monster wears crocs to a funeral when Liz came over.

‘Funerals aren’t much fun, are they?’ she said.

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘About as much fun as weddings, I suppose.’

She looked at me for a moment.

‘What is it that you’re afraid of, Brian?’ she asked.