Memorial service – or pop concert (From The Northern Echo)

Memorial service – or pop concert

1:19pm Tuesday 19th July 2011 in Peter Mullen By Peter Mullen

MEMORIAL services are not what they used to be in the City of London.

Not many years ago, the church would be packed with dignified men in pinstripes and elegant ladies in hats and veils, come to pay last respects to such as Sir Robert, chairman of Bigbank Ltd.

THEY would sing with lusty restraint hymns such as Jerusalem and The Day Thou Gavest Lord Is Ended. The reading would be from the Bible, of course: something familiar and comfortingly apt such as “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes”. It was rare to have a secular reading, but if there was to be one it would be after the style of John Donne’s matchless sonnet Death Be Not Proud. The Rector would give a short address. We would listen as the choir sang Nunc Dimittis and then everyone would repair to a local livery hall for drinks and canapes.

Occasionally, I get asked for a memorial service old style, but increasingly something more pop and pagan is required. Dress multifarious, informal. Organ music before the service might include some of Bob’s favourite ballads: anything from Singin’ In The Rain or The Beatles’ maudlin Yesterday, and, now and then, they will import the bank’s audio system and belt out something off the top of the Richter Scale by Sid Filth that makes you think of a pile-driver screwing a score of metal dustbins.

New-style memorial services are, above all, talkative. Three or even four of the deceased’s family and friends will get up to offer a tribute. We are asked to recall that Bob, or Chuckles as he liked to be called on account of his infectious giggle, was a married archangel with four children and 15 grandchildren.

He was brilliant in his work at the bank where everybody loved him. Like hell he was! Many in church wince as they remember how he used to growl at the junior staff and make them cry. And, if he was really so brilliant, why was he made redundant?

At home he had the bonhomie of Alastair Sim playing the reformed Scrooge. He kept a superb table, never failed to bring his wife flowers every Friday and he was always effervescently happy. Well, Euripides said, “Call not a man happy until he’s dead”, but I hardly thought the great philosopher meant that a man had to wait until after he’d died to effect such a remarkable character change – from curmudgeon to comedian, from reclusive skinflint to the life and soul of any party.

As for constantly taking the children sailing, they, grown up now and sitting on the front row, recall cringingly that the only time he took them on a boat was to threaten to chuck them over the side if they didn’t stop whining.

And more and more go in for this sentimental, vaguely middle-eastern, doggerel “poem” by someone with a name like Alhacca Armanaleg: “O look up to where the white night owl stares and think that this also will pass. There’s an ocean of grass so sit on your…”

There are moments so crass as to be hysterical, unbeatable. A distant cousin might slouch to the lectern and remind us that, as well as being Master of the Guild of Confectioners, Bob was, in his younger days, something of a ladies’ man. Cue for a woman in a flowery dress hinting at circumnavigation to step forward and warble, If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked A Cake.