We got locked inside a cemetery.
It costs something like £2,000 to have a coffin shipped from Scotland to France. There's the air freight costs, the various medical and consular fees, and stuff like having an officially-translated certificate from the deceased's doctor saying that they didn't have any contagious diseases. While Margaret's estate would have paid for that, it still wasn't going to be pretty.
So, having checked that it's OK to bury a casket of ashes in a French Catholic service (it is, at least in our local parish), we had Margaret cremated. We assumed that it would be easy enough to get the ashes over to France - after all, surely this is something that happens all the time?
Apparently not. After a rigorous bout of calling, the Edinburgh funeral directors found one courier company that was prepared to take the ashes, but wasn't insured for that sort of thing, so would need a waiver saying that if the ashes got lost, it wasn't their fault. For anything else I'd have taken the odds, but - no.
So we got to plan D or whatever it was: have the boss of the funeral directors drive to Périgueux with the ashes. Which he did; when we turned up at the Pompes Funèbres Aquitaine, and were confronted with a morass of flower arrangements and tacky plaques, we heard the reassuring news that the ashes had been received. The rest was just tick-list stuff: arrange the ceremony, arrange the headstone, put a notice in the local paper, make sure that egregious crimes against taste don't happen - no artificial flowers, no red or yellow flowers (Margaret despised them), no plaques. For anyone who hasn't seen a French graveyard, graves tend to accumulate plaques, traditionally A6-sized marble jobs that say things like "to our beloved uncle" or "from the guys at work" (translated into bereavement parlance first); they accumulate like lice, you can't ever get rid of them, and they're bug-ugly. These days, you get plaques that come in translucent coloured plastic. I was so pleased that you could reasonably say "No plaques whatsoever". The funeral director guy volunteered that, while they sell the things, he wouldn't want one on his grave. Good for him.
We settled everything up, and then strolled over to the nearby very large graveyard, and spent a fun hour marveling at French graves, and how they show no inclination to document who's buried, or when they were born or died, and pondering how exactly you fit apparently 8 coffins in a grave that looks like it should only fit 4. And we wandered around, and we came back to the entrance, and we saw that it had a padlock on it.
Thinking "maybe only this gate is locked", we did a much speedier second tour of the graveyard, only to find that either a) there was a gate, but it was also locked, or b) it was easy to get onto the wall, but that was because the drop on the other side was something like 5m, and onto an uncertain surface. Finally we got back to the main gate, and some random French guy accosted us, asking (roughly) "What are you doing in the cemetery at this time of night?" The law of staircase wit means that I should have told him (but didn't) "You locked us in, you bastard!"; instead I mumbled something about how we didn't expect the place to be locked, we fled to our car, drove home, the funeral directors phoned to tell us when the funeral would be, and I phoned the world.
Yesterday was All Saints' Day (the day when the French put chrysanthemums on graves, as opposed to the hypothetical day when all radio stations play songs by the Spice Girls' rivals), so nothing was happening officially. We wandered over to the Old Lady's and spoke to Barry and Yvonne, who are (and hopefully will carry on being) regular tenants. We got a list of things wrong with the place, which I'll hand over to our builders and say "Fix this!", and then we wandered back; it being a fantastically good sunny day, we had a very pleasant lunch on the terrasse, interrupted only briefly by cats, ours (Vali) or otherwise (Doudoune, our neighbour Marie-Françoise's cat).
It's becoming increasingly apparent: this is our home. I've been making a few changes - moving a chair so it's easier to go from the piano room to the kitchen; moving the glasses in the cupboard so they're arranged in a way that makes more sense to me. And that's easy because I'm home, and this is a house I expect to come home to for years on end.
There's a photo of Margaret in the kitchen, and everything is right with the world. We'll have a Catholic service next Tuesday at 2.30pm, but it should hopefully be only minimalistically religious (I'll ask the priest to dial down the Catholicism as much as he can), and in any case we've had the important service, the one in Edinburgh; this is for the French, not for us.
More rushing around today: the piano tuner's come this morning, we're going over to the cemetery to speak to the headstone guy, and finally this evening I get to speak to lawyers and find out exactly how much months it's going to take to get this sorted. Joy.
