The cold, callous hand of social distancing forbid Diana and her sister any human closeness at the moment when it was desperately required On the day of my father’s cremation, the rain set in around lunchtime and pelted down all afternoon, blown in on a breeze stiff enough to take any hairdo to pieces.
But as I pulled into the crematorium car park, shortly before five o’clock, the wind dropped a little and the rain eased. There was little more than a drizzle by the time I made my way past the garden of remembrance to the portico where my sister Harriet was sheltering, shivering because the weather had turned distinctly chilly.