Celebration...

Playlist
Halloween Alaska - Too Tall to Hide
Paul McCartney - Ram
Paul McCartney - Singles 1970-75
Paul McCartney - Chaos and Creation in the Backyard
Barclay James Harvest - Another Arable Parable
Various – My Own Current Top 50 Albums (Jukebox Shuffleplay)

The weather in Edinburgh recently has been pretty dismal - today it was raining most of the time and very windy - here are two pictures taken seconds apart to try and show the fast moving low clouds sweeping across the sky...





To add to the weather misery, we've had a couple of power cuts recently in the area around Crispycat Towers - the latest happening last night in the middle of the night at some point - meaning the alarm didn't go off this morning...

And so I was running late but just made it, after three bus journeys, to the funeral of one of the dads who lived in the street where my mum still lives...

I used to spend all summer playing there with the kids (when I was a kid too of course) and there was a real sense of community in the street...

If you are of a certain age, you will be familiar with the scenario re the funeral for one of your parents' friends - you see all the remaining "grown ups" from when you were young, and meet up with the "children" - at first trying to place the faces, remember the names and then, before you know it, you're laughing and joking about the old days....

It was Jimmy Kirkwood's funeral today. My one big memory of Jimmy was one winter's night back in what must have been the late 60's/early 70's - we'd had a particularly deep fall of snow and all the kids came out onto the street for a snowball fight. Jimmy came out too and pelted us all with snowballs - without any malice of course, he was just having a good time with his two boys, Colin and Kenneth and their friends....

Jimmy was 72. My dad was 73 when he died three years ago and, on that day, Jimmy's wife Sheila and his son Colin were the first people to come round, within hours of my dad's death, to offer their condolences and help in any way they could...

My dad and Jimmy were good friends and founded the local branch of the Rotary Club together and were both Elders in the Church - when talking with Colin and Kenneth today, we realised there were a great deal of similarities in our fathers' lives...

When we had the snowball fight, Jimmy must only have been in his mid thirties - over ten years younger than I am now - but to us he was one of the dads in the street - and now, one more dad is gone...

A funeral ought to be a celebration of life and that's surely not seventy years summed up in 30 minutes at the crematorium. The true legacy is the memories left behind with those whose lives have been touched - like the children in the snow that cold night all those years ago, laughing as another snowball met its target...

Highlight of the Day : Celebrating a life...