All Souls' Day

Today, 2nd November, is All Souls' Day. Once one strips out the layers of complexity created around it by the churches, it's a rather good idea, the day when one is supposed to remember and celebrate those who have died. It's not the sort of event which most of us in Britain bother about, with the consequence that the dead tend to be forgotten.

So, today, I'm going to spend some time thinking about the dead that I have known and loved - like my mother and father. This picture of them dates back to the late 1950s, in Mombasa. I had a print of it in a frame which I took with me to school in England, and it's how I like to remember them. My memories of them later, after they had retired to England....

....are more immediate but not as happy. This picture shows me with my mother, right, and a Haylett relative, Georgie, on the sands at Caister just after we'd consigned my father's ashes to the sea. It was a miserably cold day but we cheered ourselves up with a drink in the Ship Inn and a toast to my father.

After we moved to Scotland my mother visited us in Kilchoan. This picture of her is of her last visit before she went into a home in Hastings, where she died, her ashes....

....also being consigned to the sea at Caister so she could both be with my father and, with him, everywhere in the oceans of the world.

I'm also going to remember my friends and other relatives who have died. Inevitably, as one ages, more and more of them go so the list gets longer, but I had many very happy days with so many of them and I want to remember them and thank them for their love.

It's such a shame that the three days - All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Day (1st November) and All Souls' Day, the days of the church calendar which are supposed to celebrate the dead - have been buried under the consumerist rubbish of Hallowe'en with its trick-or-treat nonsense.