3 of 6

Admittedly nowhere as near as attractive as 7 of 9 (who featured in our conversation) but definitely the genuine article and certainly never assimilated.

The aftermath of a bereavement is unique. You enter a relative time and space that EInstein never probed and in which all things are possible, particularly the elasticity of memory. Something that you did decades before becomes as vivid as if it had happened that morning; the pain you experienced yesterday becomes dulled and unreal. Families pull together with a strange gravitational effect that is bewildering and magical. All things seem possible and nothing seems likely. Rather like falling asleep in a chair or on a train you can be snapped back to reality abruptly and feel disoriented. Or you can realise that you have lost half an hour in the labyrinth of your own neural pathways (or what is left of them if you are my age).

To cut to the quick: I went to Bristol, we drank tea, decanted to the pub and then It became a simple matter of pints and shorts, beer and whisky. No matter how old or respectable you get, no matter how sober and temperate you are the rest of the year, there is a rule in our family: you drink to the dead and send them on their way with stories and irreverent laughter.

This is just the rehearsal mind; the funeral is yet to come. But today we did what we needed to do.

So say we all.