The butterflies never did leave...

But it was a beautiful day.
I won't go into too much detail here, but I should mention that Pal's funeral had a huge turnout - Far more than I expected.
Like I said - And like the minister mentioned in the eulogy - He was a great man, and would do anything for anybody.
He didn't like people making a fuss over him, and simply liked helping people.

The funeral itself was hard. The carrying of the coffin was actually the easiest part, but it seems that my cousin is a few inches taller than I thought so I had to raise myself up to get my shoulder where it needed to be.
It turned out that the 4 of us towards the back were thinking pretty much the same thing... "I better not walk up his heels!"
I'm fairly sure Fred and Dad up front had "They better not walk up my heels!" going through their heads.
And Jamie and Billy - Well, they were screwed either way.

It went off without a hitch ( Not that Pal wouldn't have pissed himself laughing had we all gone arse-over tit. He'd just have been raging that nobody had a camcorder so we could send it to You've Been Framed! )

The eulogy, as I said, was beautiful.
When the minister mentioned that Julie ( My sister ) and I knew him as "Pal", I cracked.
And when he mentioned that he'd be sadly missed by us all, and included Morgan by name, I broke.
I am so so glad that - Much as she probably won't really remember in years to come - She at least got the chance to know Pal well enough to call him by that name.

I'm still constantly on the verge of tears, but not in a bad way. I'm at the stage now where random things remind me of him, and I cry not really out of sadness but out of the happiness of memory.
I actually started quietly sobbing to myself on Saturday morning, as walking through Glasgow airport's glass-walled corridors reminded me so much of the holidays we'd go on when I was young.
Thank god they've changed the shopping area so much, or I'd have been well away!
It's odd - Of all your senses, smell is most closely linked to memory.
And memories are like dominoes... Thinking of one thing makes you think of another. Before long you're lost in a trance of reminiscence.
Even for someone with as crap a memory as me, it's easy to go there when the memories are so powerful.
Random things, small things - An episode of Doctor Who that Pal slagged off the monsters in... The smell of newspapers and sweet tea... Mown grass and hot tar from an old shed roof.
Nothing to most of you reading this.

Everything to me.