In loving memory of the same old story

"Have you noticed how common memorial services are getting ?" said the young man next to me at dinner the other day. "There are all sorts of people getting memorial services these days who never had them before."

"That's true," said his girl-friend, with whom I had just had an amusing conversation about rabies, although she had thought we were talking about babies, which had led to some confusion. "In the old days you had to be very famous or very royal to get a memorial service."

"Or an actor," said the young man. "For some reason theatre people love having memorial services."

"That is because theatre memorial services are basically dollops of gossip served up to look like tributes," said the distinguished-looking elderly man opposite, a bit older than the rest of us. "But all memorial services are improvements on all funerals. There are at least two things dreadfully wrong with funerals."

"What are they ?" said the young woman who preferred to talk about babies rather than rabies. "The first great advantage of a memorial service is that there is no corpse," said the oldest man present. "And the second is that the vicar is edged out of the spotlight. Nothing like a vicar to mess up a funeral. At a funeral, the vicar is often the only person there who never knew the late lamented, and yet he always gets to deliver the funeral speech. Gross mismanagement. I always dread it when the vicar gets up at a funeral and put on his silky voice and says: 'I never knew Alexander very well', and everyone in the congregation is saying inwardly, 'And if you did, you would have known that everyone called him Sandy'. Yes, give me a memorial service every time. Although it was at a memorial service that I had one of my worst shocks ..."

He trailed away into silence, waiting for someone to prompt him. I obliged.

"Tell us about it."

He needed no second invitation.

"I had been invited to say a few words at the memorial service of a politician that nobody liked. I alone among the guests did not know him well enough to dislike him. I accepted. I got up at the service and told the company how among other things the late lamented had once been of great comfort to me. I said that at a time when my marriage had been undergoing a lot of strain, I had asked this man, the late lamented, for advice, as he had had three marriages shot from under him and presumably had learnt something from this. "The congregation went very still. They were not expecting anything so personal. He paused, I told them, and then he asked me if I ever went sailing. I said I did not. He said that if you went sailing you soon realised that there was a bond between the captain and the crew which it was impossible to explain and that even when things seemed bad between them, even when they fought and sulked and grumbled, the need to sail the boat properly and safely overcame all petty divisions between captain and crew."

"I told the congregation that I had thought about this for a moment, and had then asked the late lamented if he was telling me to work harder at my marriage. `Certainly not', he replied; 'I am recommending you to leave your wife and take up sailing!'

"This got a roar of laughter at the service, and many people told me afterwards that it had cheered everything up at exactly the right moment. However, one man came up to me looking very serious and said that he had been present at the memorial service of a Scottish judge two years previously, at which I had also spoken, and that I had told exactly the same story about the Scottish judge as well."

The distinguished-looking man paused.

"I looked at this man straight in the face and said that it was no doubt true. The reason I said it was no doubt true was that I always delivered the same speech about all late lamented friends, as it saved much time and energy. The man, who was a well-known journalist, said he hoped I would not mind if he put this story in his gossip column... I said I did mind very much but I did not think I could stop him. I was wrong in this, however, as several minutes later, as we were walking back along The Strand, I managed to tip him under a bus. He did not survive. I was asked to speak at his memorial service, but begged to be excused..."

The distinguished-looking man fell into silence and shortly afterwards went home. We begged our host to tell us whether the story was true.

"Not a word of truth in it," said our host," but he always tells it at dinner parties and I never tire of hearing it."