My mother's friend Beryl died. (I talked about her before: she greeted her terminal illness diagnosis with a great deal of black humour and panache.) She was actually in California at the time, taking her daughter and grandson to Disneyland - as she said, why sit in your house waiting to die? Of course, now her daughter - who has never been further away from home than Australia - has to bring her mother's body home from a foreign country, all the while dealing with the demands of a grief-stricken eight year old. Bloody awful.

(I suppose Disneyland and surrounds are the kinds of places where people die quite a lot - all those people travelling there as a kind of last hoorah. Odd to think of it.)