First funeral coming up

[Hamish]

Graham,

I am just into Friday (UK time) as I write this and, not having been on-line for over 36 hours, I can only offer my sincerest condolences on the untimely loss of your young friend.

Too late also to comment appropriately on being kilted at funerals, all I can say is that I have attended, I believe, five of these sad ceremonies since being in my 'kilt-only' years - one being that of my own father who probably would not have approved! He saw me only once kilted and, although he was the one with the Scottish mother he admitted, at that meeting, that he did not like what he saw. For some unknown reason he had no desire to acknowledge his Scottish roots and that is why I have such very scant knowledge of them myself.

As for the other funerals I have attended whilst kilted: I have worn various tartans with tweed Argyll jackets, or my grey pinstripe kilt suit - always with a white shirt and black tie as a token of respect.

As with you, people expect me to be kilted nowadays and so I do not recall ever having been thanked for wearing the kilt - nor admonished for doing so. I have certainly never been taken for a piper, possibly because pipers are an extreme rarity at private funerals here** - in fact, I have never attended a funeral at which a piper was present, and I have been to a considerable number of them in recent years. The older one becomes the more funerals there are to attend - or so it seems.

**I have requested that a piper play at my own funeral which I have long-since planned and paid for. Since I have no blood family, I did not want the burden of this to weigh on the shoulders of relative strangers!!