Local tragedy

A child was killed in a traffic accident near here yesterday. This is awful, and has made me feel miserable, especially since the news is full of the missing child in Wales too. Reminds me of the time many years ago when I was in our local newsagent in Twickenham. There had been talk of a child being killed by a car, then the police came in to tell the shop owner that it was her little boy. Dreadful. I have not achieved much in the past few days but did manage lunch with Romy yesterday. We are planning an outing in the next couple of weeks which should be fun. I am trying to do a list of my drawings and have just ordered one lot of wine for the opening. Will need a few more and some food. I think I will not provide a lot of food, but we shall see. Long chat with Nibby last night about funerals. She is against the idea and is looking into having her body collected in a bag and cremated without ceremony so that her friends and relations can just go to a wake. I pointed out that the misery of a funeral is probably important for achieving closure, but we shall see. My suspicion is that the undertakers have a complete grip on the death business and that the best one is likely to achieve is a so-called 'basic funeral'. After all, a body may need to be stored until the cremation takes place, and is probably put into some kind of coffin for transport purposes. A funeral director would arrange this so probably those costs could not be avoided. What was more interesting was Nibby's idea of producing cool ceramic urns for ashes. These could have a cheap plastic inner to be removing for scattering ashes and the urn kept as a memorial. I suppose these could be personalised, and I would quite favour a kind of Grayson Perry look to it. I thought it was a really good idea. I may commission one of these from Nibby. I suppose it could be handy to keep flour or sugar in afterwards. I imagine mine full of flour, with my fat lady image on the outside, to serve as a terrible warning to someone about to make a cake with it. I could have a balloon coming from my mouth with the legend:'just don't make the cake' or some such. I am sure Nibby or Dorothy could think of something more pithy. Oh well. I seem to have gone from tragedy to trivia in these few words.