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Before Tuesday the last funeral I attended was 6 years ago and the difference could not be more striking.

Funerals are for mourning losses and for celebrating lives. The balance between the two often depends on the nature and timing of the death.

Martin was 28 and died after an 18 month battle with bowel cancer. My Granddad was 93 and died after many years with Alzheimers.

Both were mourned, but when someone is taken so early in a life it is almost impossible to celebrate anything. How can a life so short be celebrated when there was so much still ahead? It was a painfully moving funeral, full of a sense of waste and helplessness in the face of disease.

For Granddad, the end was expected - not precisely but in general terms. There is no certainty like death - I will die and everyone I have ever known will die. Perhaps in millenia to come death will be the stuff of human history, but for now our universal truths are love and death.

When the life has been lived fully and the end, for the true person inside, came some years ago, it is a time to bring those two together and show that death does not conquer love, it reaffirms it.

If there is such thing as a good funeral, Granddad received one. A gathering of the clan to give a very warm and affectionate farewell. Gentility and dignity in a very English way.

Afterwards, thoughts turn to the inevitable - I wonder who will be at mine. Again, timing is the key. The earlier you go the more you get. Working life keeps the numbers up, as does procreation. Making some assumptions about my full term, my offspring (none, damnit, none!) and the life expectancy of my own generation of relatives, I reckon I will struggle to reach double figures.

Which should keep the cost down.