Folk Festival

June 2023

The main event for the last week has been the Warwick Folk Festival, where I have volunteered in the Comms team for the last two years. This year I also offered glamping services to two friends - they would have had to borrow or hire a car to bring their tent, so I set up my tent complete with bed, table, chairs, stove and tea and coffee so they could just bring themselves by train.

The festival runs from Thursday evening to Sunday evening, but I volunteered for an extra shift on the gate on Tuesday when contractors and team members started to turn up, and I was also in the Comms room on Wednesday when we were getting ready. The team leadership has been shared between two people for the last ten years or so, but both of them have been planning to retire from the role. I've been quite clear that I'm not prepared to take it on, but have been persuaded to share the leadership with another chap.

My tactic, if it could be called that, is to take an interest but to avoid direct responsibility for things. Luckily the other chap has not been so reticent, taking notes and photographing the Comms room so as to record what will come in handy next year. He even read the Health and Safety folder and provided feedback to the management team. One of the retiring team leaders wisely kept out of the way for most of the time, but the other was obviously finding it difficult to give up a role that he clearly loves, so he essentially continued to do it without really handing over anything in any organised fashion, we just had to pick it up as we went along. I'm sure it will be fine.

UJ returned from another trip home to Kyiv just before the festival and has settled in again in the usual way where I barely see her. As ever there's plenty of other business to keep me occupied. I have called upon a couple of roofing companies to have a look at three roofing issues: staining on the ceiling near the front door, the leaking roof lantern in the kitchen, and the disintegrating veranda roof outside. My hurty arm continues to hurt but very much less, and I have added massage to the treatment which not only helps (temporarily) but is very enjoyable. And board games, badminton and Buddhism continue to fill my life with satisfaction and fun.

The aftermath

July 2024

The administrative processes around death and burial will be familiar to all who have experienced a loss, so I shouldn't imagine that what we experienced was unique. We made it harder for ourselves by wishing to conduct the funeral as quickly as possible. If we'd agreed a date the following week then I wouldn't have had to get quite so familiar with people at the GP practice, the Register Office, the medical examiner and the coroner's office, and we wouldn't have been at the cemetery 30 minutes before the funeral started still not knowing whether the burial would form part of it. But it worked out fine in the end, even giving us a few opportunities to smile.

Dad was a medical doctor through and through, and although his body could not be donated for medical science because he died at home, he managed to donate his non-Parkinson's brain for research into Parkinson's disease. He was strongly anti-religion, and we reflected this in our choices at the funeral. There were a couple of readings, an 'appreciation' of his life constructed by the remaining four of us and read by Lola II. The coffin went into the grave with another reading, and mum recited the Kaddish prayer for the dead, either because she wished to or for the Jewish people in attendance, I couldn't work out which. Maybe both. Then we went off for tea.

I was away staying with mum for very nearly a week, sometimes with Lola II and Sister D and their husbands there too. On the day after the funeral we'd long been planning to take mum over to Lola II and Mr M's for the day, and there seemed no reason not to go ahead with the plan, and we even persuaded her to stay overnight. Mum reviewed and gave her seal of approval to all changes that had taken place in their house since she was last there, and Lola II arranged to borrow her regular adoptive dog as a treat - for him and for us.

It was good to come back home afterwards, and I tried to recall the effort I'd put into reflection while I was on retreat, and my determination to change my lifestyle, but it all felt a little remote. I'm trying to take the steps I worked out then to make positive and constructive changes, particularly around food, exercise, Internet access and meditation. 

We had planned a day for the Buddhist group team to come together on Sunday at my house, and it couldn't have been a better time to meet. Since then I've done pretty well with my resolutions - there's been no chocolate or snacks, I've enquired at the local leisure centre about what I might do for exercise, I've meditated every day (which absolutely wasn't the case before I went on retreat) and I have set an alarm so I don't spend more than 60 minutes at a time sitting at the computer. Which is one reason why this blog post has taken so long to put together.

I also went to the doctor with my hurty arm, which (as so often happens) started to hurt a lot less as soon as I made the appointment, but I've got some heavy duty anti-inflammatory drugs to take for two weeks anyway, and a self-referral to a physiotherapist. I also joined an online meeting of the Comms team for the Warwick Folk Festival and I'm still pretty confident that they won't try to put me in charge. Then I went back to mum's for a couple more days to continue with the admin, and here we are, two weeks on. Apart from mum not being tied to the house any longer, everything feels very much the same as before.

Coming home

1987

I wrote the following paragraphs on Friday when I got home from the retreat:

"It was a very good retreat, partly because it wasn't part of the ordination process like the last two I've attended. Ordination retreats are hard work for me, and I've had to think about why this is, because on the surface they contain nearly the same elements - meditation, ritual, time for reflection - and the additional element of group discussion is something I welcome. This was an introductory retreat (so participants didn't even have to know about or practise Buddhism) which means that the common foundation of knowledge and practice is missing and retreatants can be quite challenging. It also included more of the outdoors and quite a lot of poetry, and I had a role as organiser so I had to do a bit of extra work to make sure the week ran smoothly.

"But despite the organising and poetry I found it much more nourishing and relaxing than the previous two retreats, and maybe it's because I was camping, but there's also something about not having to achieve a standard. I did a lot of thinking about why I'm dissatisfied about a few things, and came up with a few answers, and I have even put together a tentative plan. We'll see.

"My journey to the retreat was in stages - first a visit to mum and dad, then on to a friend in Dartford, then to Mr MXF and BL2 (their daughter was there too), and finally to the retreat centre in East Sussex. On the way back I stopped for lunch with a friend near Tunbridge Wells before the long drive home.

"The best part of coming home from a retreat is my own shower. Retreat centres are perfectly warm and comfortable but the showers are definitely only just good enough. The worst part of coming home from a retreat is all the routine stuff that awaits - shopping, cooking, cleaning, admin and tidying up."

It turns out that wasn't the worst part of coming home from this retreat. On Saturday morning mum phoned to say she'd had to call the paramedics because dad was unwell. On Sunday morning, holding my hand, he died, and we buried him on Wednesday.

2009