Yesterday the Dear Leader and I attended the funeral of a very dear friend, for me of I think 38 years' standing, for the DL someone she'd known and loved since the first day of senior school. As Mary was a very devout Catholic the funeral service took the form of a requiem mass, and sadly until the eulogy by her brother-in-law it missed out almost entirely on the personal - for a convinced atheist it seemed like men in expensive dresses doing things by numbers, but I'm sure her family felt differently, and if it was a comfort to them, all to the good.
The DL was, however, so upset by how impersonal the priests made things - the brief show at the crematorium was worse still - that she refused to shake the monsignor's hand. As I say, Mary was a strong catholic, so each to their own, but she was also a force of friendship nature, something that the haughty coutured ones only really touched at a tangent. After the mass and the crematorium the family had arranged what Mary's husband Mike would disarmingly call 'a nice ham tea,' in fact a very generous and enjoyable buffet where the many different circles of her friends mixed, and we chatted with old friends and exchanged stories of meals and meetings past. That was, for me, so much closer to representing Mary and her gift of friendship.
Over the years we ate many meals together, at one another's homes and a couple of times when we holidayed as two families in France. There was a certain amount of rivalry, and all dietary health concerns were put to one side in the pursuit of flavour bonus points over the other as we took it in turns to prepare meals. As an example, I can still recall almost 20 years on one of my efforts being freshly-peeled prawns in cream flambeed in Calvados, and Mary producing pork with cream and apples cooked with cider - we were in Normandy as might be guessed from that. She beat me hands down on culinary kit kudos, bringing her own set of posh kitchen knives in a ninja-black cloth roll.
Mary was an absolute original, enormously generous of her time and her table - the meals she served to a huge circle of friends over the years would have paid for several ridiculous Italian sports cars, though she would never have wanted one. We differed on quite a few things - not least the spelling of the word grey/gray in this blog - some of them culinary: she didn't, for example, see the point in soup; she called beetroot 'the devil's vegetable,' and she rarely made pudding, but then her guests (expected to bring dessert if they wanted it) would be so full with starter, main, salad and cheese that it was superfluous.
The first time I met Mary was when she visited the DL (merely then an object of unspoken admiration on my part) at university. Mary enjoyed enough Guinness for two that evening, and we had innumerable convivial soirees in the following years. For about 25 years the DL and I were members of an exclusive wine society she formed, those wishing to join having to prove their knowledge by identifying red wine from white by sight alone. Doubtless the visually impaired would have been given several guesses. The DL and I will have a particularly good meal tonight in her honour, and open the best bottle to hand (with the proviso that the sluicing must fit the browsing, as it always did with Mary and Mike's events) to toast a special person, and an unsurpassed hostess.
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