Its fair to say that I had really not been looking forward to Dad’s funeral, but I was very much looking forward to it all being over.

The time between him dying and the funeral has been strange. I have felt very vague, found it hard to concentrate at work, and more or less been on hold for a couple of weeks. Now it feels like I can continue but I do not know why that is.

People talk about ‘closure’, but I still do not understand it. Like most of my family I have no religious beliefs so I don’t feel that Dad is now any more dead than before or any more alive. Nothing has really changed, but it feels like it has.

Anyway, after a better than usual drive up there we met up with my two sisters and their husbands and children, passed some time – we had all travelled early just in case – and headed off to the crematorium.

The service was religious but not overly so. Mary had mentioned the rationale before: Dad was not religious but he was a bit traditional, and that sounded right. The minister there spoke quite well, at least sparing us any attempt to pretend that he knew Dad at all. I’m not sure I liked the blunt way he pointed out how at such events when parents or grandparents die everyone else moves up a generation. It sounded to me very much like a way of saying to me “You’re next”, but then that is a thought which crosses your mind anyway.

Last week Mary had asked me if I wanted to say anything at the service, and I said no. What I really meant, of course, was that not that I didn’t want to but that I didn’t think I could. Its not that there is nothing to say about Cliff, just that I would not trust myself to be able to say it. I was watching the news the other day and there was some film from a press conference about Meredith Kercher, the student who was killed in Italy. Her sister was speaking and became an instant hero in my eyes.

In our case Dad was suffering from a terminal illness and we knew he could go soon so we were at least a bit prepared. Also, although he died young by today’s standards he had just about got in his threescore years and ten. Despite all that, if I had tried to speak about him even just in front of a room full of family and friends, and after two weeks to adjust I would not have got very far. I would have seized up, broken down or found some other way to make everyone uncomfortable. And yet Meredith’s sister, only days after the event was perfectly composed. Hats off to her.

I don’t know what I would have said. I was not close to Dad in the traditional sense. I lived with him and worked with him in London. After a while I moved to another department and moved out to my own place, but we still socialised a lot. When he moved out of London I saw less of him obviously, and then when I moved out of London in the opposite direction we saw each other even less. We tended to avoid deep conversations but a few times when it mattered he gave me some sound advice (which I ignored of course) and some positive encouragement which I will always remember.

We shared an interest in music, comedy and books, although we didn’t totally share tastes. By which I mean that I appreciated him sharing what he knew, lending me some books, letting me pillage his record collection, or telling me about stuff I would be interested in. He was not quite as interested in keeping up with my tastes in punk, the blossoming alternative comedy scene and so on, but then he wasn’t supposed to.

Our children only knew ‘grandad Cliff’ as a bloke who looked like an older version of me, living on his own and not getting out much. That is not the way the rest of us remember him. He always used to be a committed life and soul of the party, and loved to throw his own. He especially liked it if he had a chance to try and prove that he was the only white man able to dance the Ghanian highlife properly.

He moved around a bit and yet it never took long in a new place before he had a wide circle of new friends. Before moving out to Herts he was a was a bit of a ladies’ man. That is a polite way of putting it. Her certainly played the field a bit. But after he moved he met his soul mate and married her. His new wife, Sue, had her three children all living locally and for him they were like a new instant family. For a few years he was very settled and totally content until she died far too soon. I think that took a lot out of him, and he was never the same after that.

My sisters and I have also had our fair share of failed marriages or relationships but I think we are all now in the position Dad was when he met Sue of having finally ended up with just the right person. I wish Dad had as much time with his soul mate as (I hope) we will get with ours.

The headline at the top is, of course, a reference to what Spike Milligan always said he wanted on his tombstone, and what he eventually got. Dad used to listen to the Goon Show on what he no doubt called the wireless. His book of Goon Show scripts was always a prized possession, and he never lost his affection for that. He never missed an opportunity to play me old tapes of the show and encourage my own interest in Spike Milligan.

I noticed that he sill had the complete Goon Shows on CD and a couple of copies of a Spike Milligan books around his house. He thought he still had anything from three to six months left in him so he had started making his preparations, and it really would not surprise me if the thought had crossed his mind to ask for the same thing.