Another year gone by

As I said a year ago, August Bank Holiday Sunday is the anniversary of my  father’s death.

It was a hotter day than last year (the news tells me the hottest such Sunday ever) and a lot hotter than the day twenty five years ago that we went through Burnham Beeches to see my father for the last time. That was sunny  but cool, I recall, the sunlight dappled through the leaves of the trees.

As I did last year I went and looked in the storage space under my bed for a copy of the poem I wrote at the time. Didn’t find it this year either: I don’t know why  I’m convinced it’s down there. But I searched all the way through two crates before giving up.

I resolved to shred almost all the stuff I found in the Far Isles box: under Data Protection I probably should have done so some time ago and getting rid of most of the old forms should be done before I hand over to the new Secretary next year.

I was going to get rid of a lot of stuff from the ‘memorabilia box’ too but after a while working with good intentions I just found myself unable to get rid of much: which accounts for the accumulated piles of paper in there in itself.

There are old theatre programs and reviews. There’s stuff dating back to my university  career. There are notes from old role-playing campaigns and writing exercises. No one will care about this stuff when I go and if I were being kind to my  nieces and my nephew (who are likely to be my executors) I’d get rid of it all. But I can’t: my memory is getting terrible and some of this stuff I wouldn’t remember at all if I didn’t keep the physical remnants.

There’s so much stuff that evokes the past and so much past I don’t think of from one year’s end to the next. Perhaps next year I’ll get  out a different box.

Perhaps I won’t find that poem till I either move from this flat (very unlikely) or decide it’s time to simplify my life and give a whole lot of my books, games and other possessions away to the people I’ve bequeathed them to. (Something I consider almost every time I can’t find things.)

I attach the order of service from my father’s funeral which I found while searching. I’ll put it in my  scrapbook which is where I should have put that poem if I had the sense God gave a peanut.

I keep dreaming of Dad and it’s sad that we always seem to be in some sort of quarrel when we meet again. The  poem I can’t find was about that too, if I recall it correctly.

Monty, by the way, is showing that he was not getting old and unwell over the past few months of not eating much of his evening wet food, merely on hunger strike. He has decided he is going to relish the alternate kidney-friendly cat food I got him. He refused to touch it the first time I tried it on him. Cats!