VALE

One of my very best friends just died and at the funeral I had the strange sense of divorce, of the end of relationships. Not so much, then, about the loss of the individual but about irreversible change. Many people say that among other things, a divorce means a partitioning of friends: his friends / her friends and rarely if ever shall the twain meet again.

As I said, I felt the same, standing in my former friend's garden in south London only a few days ago. Here again was a partition taking place as the thought came to me that, except perhaps at the anticipated memorial service, I will never see the family - neither the widow northe children, again.

At least not without effort and being a witness to death makes one so very weary.