Even if I said so myself, we’d done a good job organisation-wise. Maybe because it had been clear from the outset how many rainbow balloon arches there should be, i.e. zero. Weirdly enough, this was actually going to be my first funeral. My dad’s parents hadn’t been in the picture, which was fitting since neither was he; my mum’s dad likewise; and my mum’s mum was still very much alive in the south of France, preserved into her nineties by a diet of olive oil and red wine. In some ways, given how few shits I gave about David Blackwood, it was the least traumatic first funeral I could have been to. Apart from the tiny, tiny detail that there was a good chance it would utterly destroy my boyfriend’s mental health.

It was one of those sullen wintery days where it felt like the sky was scowling, too pissed off to even do the decent thing and rain. Various mourners were milling around the gardens and outside the main building, looking like mildly irritable shadow puppets. That was the thing about funerals: you were either distraught because the deceased was someone you were incredibly close to, or you were bored and awkward because they weren’t but some indirect tie of blood or friendship meant you were obligated to be there.

Also, crematoria were fucking weird. They were basically a quite nice garden outside a factory for disposing of corpses, with a friendly nondenominational chapel bolted onto the front. And to give them credit, they went to a lot of trouble to disguise the whole corpse-disposal aspect of their business, but the honking great industrial chimney was a giveaway that my eyes kept drifting back to. The other eerily industrial thing about the crematorium experience was that—and I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way—they didn’t half pack them in. Which meant there was a five-minute window between the last service ending and ours beginning. So while Oliver went inside to, I don’t know, greet the vicar, hug his mum, have his shirt criticised for old time’s sake, I was left trying to herd a bunch of people who didn’t know who I was, or have reason to listen to me, into a building they didn’t want to be in for a very tight turnaround.

I didn’t think I made any friends, but it would have been weird if I had. And, after a little while, Mia was there to help because this was apparently the partner’s job. Or maybe she just wanted to get away from the rest of her husband’s family.

On the whole, I was proud that we managed to get everyone in and ourselves into our embarrassingly front-row seats bang on the dot of eleven. One of the artfully reassuring people who worked at the crematorium closed the doors behind us and then… Well. That was showtime.