A judge, Lord Byron and a grave injustice

Dearly beloved

One of the many things I miss about my wife’s late father, Ray, was his habit of phoning me up on a Sunday morning to say he’d enjoyed what I’d written in the Observer that weekend, before cheerfully pointing out its errors, factual and grammatical.

A former typesetter and teacher of graphic design, Ray typically adopted a similar keen-eyed approach to what, towards the end, he guessed might be his impending funeral arrangements. He spent some of his last hospital days perfecting an order of service – Stan Kenton and Danny Boy and John Masefield – and the layout of his gravestone, with underlined instruction for its typeface: Bembo. We found versions of these instructions tucked in his glasses case and used as bookmarks and obviously did our best to keep to the letter of them, hearing his voice in our heads.

I was reminded of Ray, reading about last week’s ludicrous court case in which Judge Stephen Eyre QC, chancellor of the diocese of Lichfield, ruled that John Chadfield could not quote from Lord Byron’s verse “So we’ll go no more a-roving” on his wife’s memorial stone in a local churchyard. The grounds involved the idea that “the passage from Byron is part of a secular poem which conveys no suggestion of Christian resurrection”.

Chadfield was also prevented from using the phrase “our boys” to describe the sons he and his wife of 51 years had raised, on the basis that it was “overly personal”: “It is important to bear in mind that the inscriptions will be read not just by those who knew the departed loved one but also by those who did not,” the judge noted. Isn’t that justification enough for it to capture a flavour of who they were and what they loved?

Fathers and daughters

In one of our now rare family cinema outings, because my elder daughter is away at university, we managed to find an evening to see Greta Gerwig’s fabulous Little Women last week. On the way home, there was debate about who was the most likable of the Marches – Jo or Beth or Meg or Amy.

Spare a thought for the father, I suggested, who, having returned from the war, was confronted with several years’ worth of high-octane sibling drama before he could take his boots off. Imagine the decibels. I was, inevitably, shouted down from all sides.

In summary

I liked how John McPhee, a star of the New Yorker magazine for 55 years, last week decided to tie up some loose ends from his career.

At 88, he acknowledged that plans for books he had carried around in his head for decades might not now get written, so he had written the stories in one-page versions. The exercise went some way to proving a long-held suspicion that hardly any nonfiction book isn’t improved by being on a side of A4.

Plans for Nigel

In the excitable talk of Big Ben bongs, the entertainment for the hours leading up to the 11pm exit at Nigel Farage’s Parliament Square party seems to have been neglected. Speaking on the radio, Richard Tice, Brexit’s catalogue model, suggested that there would “probably be a singalong”.

He hadn’t thought of a playlist. Is it not too late for Mark “Frenchy” Francois to crowdfund for a supergroup? If memory serves, among those desperate to “get it done” were Elaine Paige, Johnny Rotten and, inevitably, the exiled little Englander, Morrissey. A red-white-and-blue medley of Memories, Anarchy in the UK and Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now sounds about perfect.

• Tim Adams is an Observer writer