Has the funeral director been sizing up the BB?

The funeral director down the lane is also the local taxi service, which partly explains why I see him drive past our back gate so often.

According to my neighbours, he has been known to joke ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’, and although he has not gone so far as to have this written on the side of his car, his approach does stand as testament to the Irish having a wonderfully earthy sense of humour.

The builder boyfriend met this funeral cabbie, or taxi mortician, when he went to the wake of the elderly man who sold us our house. The BB claimed that the funeral director eyed him, or rather sized him – as in he shook his hand for longer than was polite, looking up and down, then left to right – as if to assess his dimensions.

I told the BB not to be so stupid. Of course that didn’t happen. But he insisted it did.

I had been in London at the time and, as the builder b had stayed behind in West Cork, he represented us to pay our respects when the former owner of our house died while I was away.

‘Listen to me,’ the BB said earnestly and urgently, as he does when he really wants me to believe a tall tale he’s telling, because against all the odds it’s true. ‘He shook my hand for so long it was obvious he was measuring me up for a coffin. He did the same to everyone, especially the ones coughing and spluttering.’

He said that was not the worst thing. There were, he said, women sitting around the edge of the darkened room muttering Latin prayers. The BB is apt to be hysterical about ritual.