A Very Northern Funeral

K G takes the longest journey home.
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Brussels south station - early morning. Outside, gangs of muggers prowl the builders yard that is the station car park, attracted by the rich pickings on offer courtesy of the bemused business folk who wander aimlessly around the maze of corrugated plastic sheeting and palates of brick, cement and cabling, searching for the sanctuary that is the taxi rank, a promise of a quick getaway from depression and squalor.

Inside, once through passport control you are cocooned within a tiny bubble of Englishness, connected to Albion via a thin corridor of rail and a fucking great big hole in the ground. Sarf Lahdan jeans and trainers and pinstripes of Chelsea stare disapprovingly at anyone with the effrontery to speak Flemish or French. This train goes to Waterloo, Belgium and France are simply in the way.

Brit Eurostar novices coo and ahh and ooooh at how a train can travel at over milk float velocities without doing somersaults. The tunnel virgins squeal with excitement at the announcement that at any moment we will be diving underground. 2 minutes later they realise this is no Forth Bridge, it goes dark for 20 minutes and then you're in Kent.

As the train crawls over the English tracks like an Olympic athlete running in callipers, I have more than enough time to think about why I'm here, on this train heading North for the second time in a little under 8 weeks, to confront the reality of a personal loss. I remember coming back from a day out in Brugge, where I spent an afternoon supping one of the great ales of the world in one of the great bars of the world. I remember checking my mail, and suddenly here was my sister, telling me our mam was dead. Numb. Give me alcohol.

Arrangements are made, holidays and tickets booked, suitcases packed.

At King's Cross the wife interfaces with the social skills course smile of the ticket drone. I am not in the mood for any social interaction that involves translating chirpy-cockney-sparra-esque. The south of England does not like me, and I do not like it. I am not in the fairest of moods. I need/want to be 212 miles due North of here. I would like to achieve this objective in reasonable comfort and without a financial transaction on the scale of a major city take-over bid.

It would also be nice to travel to York to a time scale that does not involve the use of a fucking calendar. Sadly, our only option is to take our lives in our hands and hang on for grim death aboard a jalopy whose interior resembles the underneath of Barney Gumble's sofa. As we sprint down the platform in a desperate attempt to secure seats we pass the dispirited souls who only recently made half hearted attempts to make our conveyance look worthy of the transport of human beings.

The trip from King's Cross is punctuated by prolonged periods of walking speed progress and curious unannounced stops in the middle of nowhere. Old men with bicycles cruise past the jewel in the crown of the Great North Eastern Railway's fleet as it lurches it's way Northwards.

I spend a couple of hours chatting to a teacher sat opposite, about the systematic way the Tory unmentionables raped our country. All around the carriage their now clearly repentant accomplices cough nervously and smile almost apologetically as we pogo through Grantham.

Just outside of Doncaster, on a stretch of track I must have traversed at least a thousand times, we limp over an embankment that only recently decided it was bored with life, and attempted suicide. Glow in the dark yellow workmen administer counselling by the brighter than the sun glare of a million floodlights. All around vast tracts of Yorkshire lie half submerged, as if in the opening stages of some monstrous gamble to turn half the county into a huge paddy field, and corner the Basmati rice market. Palin's chicken's have come home to roost. Welcome to the third world - this is Yorkshire. Surreal.

“When he's not trying to convince us he lived in our shed for nigh on forty years, he bellows out the odd hymn, tells us how awful the world is, how miserable we all are, and how death is stalking us at every turn.”

We drag ourselves off at York, far from chuffed at the "you are not worthy" attitude of the GNER flesh onboard, who have gleefully announced to the inmates that we have arrived almost half an hour ahead of their doomsday scenario schedule. Reminding them that we are in fact two and a half hours later than we might have been had the Railways not been run along the lines of a chimp's tea party at Whipsnade zoo is met with tight lipped smiles and a defiant silence, with definite overtones of "next time walk then you clever bastard".

We get in a cab, and hey presto we no longer have to say things 6 times and exceptionally slowly. We are understood. Later that evening I fulfil a promise I made earlier to my brother and we drink an unhealthy amount of John Smith's best bitter.

The next day. The inner sanctum of relatives arrive, and the mood is suprisingly up-beat, as though there exists an unspoken agreement to subscribe to the "celebration of a life" stance. We make the short journey to the Chapel of Rest, to meet up with more of the nearest and dearest. Unconvincing handshakes and tissue paper thin smiles cannot hide years of distant indifference.

Time for a ride in a big black posh car, past buildings only recently three foot six under water, driven by a chap who seems to have fallen out of a Victorian era costume drama. Once at the crematorium, we greet some cousins, one truly grieving, one idly chewing gum and constantly consulting a wrist watch with a barely concealed sense of impatient urgency. Excuses are offered up for the non-attendance of another cousin, just in case we are the slightest bit interested in the reason for his no-show. We are not. I am surprised to find out that an often mentioned friend of mams, the legendary figure who shared double shifts at a munitions factory that once made sweeties was a in fact a real person.

Inside, a Methodist minister spends 10 minutes talking about someone he never met as though they had been joined at the hip, his clipped, considered Southern tones finger nails on a blackboard onto which the details of a very Northern life have been chalked. When he's not trying to convince us he lived in our shed for nigh on forty years, he bellows out the odd hymn, tells us how awful the world is, how miserable we all are, and how death is stalking us at every turn.

He presses his secret button with all the aplomb of Tommy Cooper doing the "spoon-jar-spoon" trick, and mam is gone. I smile to myself, knowing afterwards she would have commented on just how nice a pair of curtains she disappeared behind. I dismiss the thought that she might be en route to some dreary grey Methodist run moan-in of an afterlife, preferring to think she was waiting for a hopper bus to somewhere with 24 hour drop in Bingo, a kettle always on, and something worth watching on the telly, hopefully a place where our dad is peeling spuds for dinner, and a small, white manic dog waits by the front door, ready to rip the net curtain down in excitement when she gets there.

The next day. Me, my brother, and his daughter's boyfriend load up mam's furniture into a hire van, on a mission to dole it out to two of her grand-daughters. As we lift her arm-chair up, her hair brush falls out.

As we prepare to drive away, I look at the unemployed kids opposite, half heartedly kicking a football about in the drizzle, quietly muttering who knows what to themselves.

I take a long last look around the estate I grew up on, now seemingly populated only by people who have dropped off the edge of society, or those who are working themselves into an early grave, clawing their fingers to the cuticles simply to avoid falling themselves. I am glad that I shall never have to come here again.

We get in the van, and drive away.