27 August 2026

Cambridge woke to a desperately needed proper rainfall this morning.

Making coffee in the kitchen I thought I must be hallucinating when I suddenly heard bagpipes start up outside the front door. Through the front room window I saw there were indeed two pipers in the road, playing a slow, solemn, mournful lament, and realised it was for a neighbour two doors along who had died at home.

They played all the while her coffin was being loaded into a hearse outside the house, then began to pipe a funeral procession - the pipers walking in front of the slowly moving hearse and a crowd of family, friends and neighbours walking behind it. All were under umbrellas in steady light rain, stopping the traffic and proceeding slowly along the roads to a funeral mass at the cathedral.

I think my encounter with the robin yesterday has blown my heart wide open, because I was so moved by this sight that I found myself standing in my front room weeping for someone I hadn't even known.

The medelyde (such a good Afrikaans word, not the same as compassion, but suffering with) felt as intense and raw as the sense I had in the garden late last night, like someone on hallucinogenics, that all around me was such astonishing beauty that it felt like seeing the world for the first time.

What is happening to me?

An hour later I walked back in the rain from the local GP, enjoying the smell of rain and the slick black streets.

Coming past Our Lady of the Assumption & the English Martyrs (a name I'll never tire of enjoying and also a church I've come to love), I saw our neighbour's hearse parked at the front entrance, her funeral mass in process inside.

I thought about how rare the sight in our road this morning was (in England, at least), and how it brings death home, quite literally, to us all, when a person is taken from their home - the moment marked and given weight by meaningful music - and everyone around is involved, a small community coming together to walk them out of this life in the world, so to speak. We have lost so much with these rituals disappearing.

I imagined this brown dry earth feeling grateful for the rain at last. And here on Parker's Piece was the forlorn sight of a children's fairground being dismantled - behind the screens were colourful bouncy castles lying wet and deflated like popped balloons at the end of a party - also marking the end of summer as kids go back to school.