Remembering Father Damian

This one is SOOC. It was the only shot I could get where the sun was shining. We had plenty of other weather!

I attended the funeral, at a care home in Cheltenham, of Father Damian, who was a Benedictine monk at Prinknash Abbey when I worked in the gift shop there in the noughties. He was a charming and flamboyant man, 'one of the guys with a sense of humour', I thought at the time. He'd since gone into the care home and died relatively young, at the age of 70, because of long term health problems. He will be missed, though the abbot suggested, in his surprisingly frank homily, that Father Damian's obsessive interest in the (beauty of the) liturgy will not! Apparently they had to beg him to change the subject, and it became worse as he grew deaf and carried on talking...

The service was beautiful, with the monks' plainsong in English and Latin. Benedictine monks wear white robes (with white pointy hoods that they don't put up too often, thank goodness) so they don't look too funereal, even at a funeral. There even seemed to be a new young monk with a bushy red beard. My friend Dave, who is still a cleaner at the abbey, no longer cleans the monastery and doesn't know him. Maybe he has come down from Pluscarden Abbey, in Aberdeenshire.

Anyway, there you go. I still sit on the fence but find myself working at a Catholic school and going to a High Catholic funeral. Traditional church music is fabulous, whatever mood I'm in.
I was never in the school choir, but that didn't stop me appreciating the choral tradition (I think our school choir was good in the 1970s, but the best choirs aren't all-female, in my opinion).

Dave and I went for a Chinese meal afterwards, and later a cup of tea, and the best gluten free brownie ever. I kind of wanted to ask questions and to think about father Damian all day, but Dave is going on holiday next week, so he was in holiday planning mode. I guess that, having not been to my friend Una's funeral because it was in Sri Lanka and a high-profile United Nations affair, I am still very focused on death and how we deal with it.

We decided that, as we hadn't gone to the seaside today on account of the funeral, we'd try to go another day this spring or summer. Perhaps one when it's not raining.