My father once told me that he loved a good funeral. He said the best funerals were the ones where pallbearers lowered the coffin into the ground while rain lashed sideways, soaking the mourners as they wrestled with windblown umbrellas.

“If you’re going to go, at least give people a really bleak funeral,” he’d said, pint in hand. So when it came to organising my father’s funeral, I knew, even in the thickness of my grief, that it had to be a bloody good one.

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