13/09/05 Stressful Day

I'd arranged to take my Dad to a funeral of an old friend of his in Motherwell today. We had to be at the Funeral Directors for a little service at 9.45am, before we headed to the Crematorium.
This meant an early start. I had to leave my flat at 7.45am! (sharp intake of breath from around the world).
My internet map printing and navigational skills paid off handsomely, and we arrived in plenty of time. It was after this service that things began to go horribly wrong.
I lost the cortege. It was tricky driving out of the Funeral directors car park as it was on a main road and we couldn't all keep together.
Eventually I found the Crematorium after asking about 5 different people in the street,( who each had slightly different interpretations on directions.)
It turned out it was the wrong Crematorium.
Running low on petrol, I stopped at 4 separate petrol stations and found out that they had no petrol left. This was caused by panic buying by people worrying about industrial action on petrol duty by freight companies scheduled for this week.
I eventually found a garage with some petrol left.
It looked at one point that I was going to have to ditch the car in Motherwell then get a train back east.
We missed the service. I felt terrible about it, but my dad seemed philosophical about the whole thing.
After another long search of Motherwell, we found the hotel where the funeral reception was on. Phew... It turned out that quite a few people had got lost and missed the service. This made me feel slightly less idiotic.
I collared the minister and managed to borrow the transcript of what he'd said about my dad's friend Barr at the service. My dad enjoyed reading this, so at least he had experienced a written account of the sentiments expressed at the service.
I'm sure Barr would have found the whole scenario of us tearing around Motherwell looking for the right crematorium, running out of petrol, as being classic Park mentalist behaviour, and he'd have realised that we mean well, in spite of all this incompetence.
Anyway, I enjoyed the banter and the scones. Although a pednatic old gent sitting next to me informed me that the scones were not scones, as such, ....but that's another exciting story that I will tell on another day.
We promised Barr's widow Kathy that we'd be in touch soon and would bring through some old photos of Dad and Barr in their prime.