In Memory Of Rosie Burningham.

Mum and Grandpa at Mum's First wedding.

Order of Service:

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Funeral Service for the late ROSEMARY JILL BURNINGHAM

Opening Music – ‘Let It Be Me’ sung by the Everly Brothers

Welcome and Introduction

Opening Prayer

Hymn – ‘Jerusalem’ (Words needed)

Psalm 23

Reading – ‘Remember Me’ by Christina Rossetti read by Jonathan Burningham

Thoughts – Simon Kennedy

Tribute & Address – The Reverend Canon David Nason

Reflection – ‘Let It Be’ sung by The Beatles

Prayers, including the Lord’s Prayer

Commendation and Committal

Blessing

Closing Music – ‘Three Little Maids From School’ by Gilbert and Sullivan

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My Part:

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For Mum

2018-07-30

I have to thank you all for joining us here today to remember Mum with us.

To start with I want to share something I try to do every morning. It’s an adaptation of a yoga exercise. I want as many of you to join me and try this now. You push the corners of your mouth up as for as you can get them. You do that almost to the point where it hurts, then you try to hold it. Now you relax, and part of it stays. In Buddhist yoga circles they tend to call this smiling.

I was going to pretend I was trying to make a phone call, and Mum was doing her usual. Too many calls with Jonathan with Mum in the background saying “Don’t forget to tell him!”, and “Have you said?”

I was going to pretend she was doing that now, but the only thing I can actually hear her saying is “Why are they so sad? Tell them to stop that, I don’t want them to be sad!”

That’s why I just asked you to smile, because I really think she wouldn’t want us to be sad today, and to try and remember the funny, ever so slightly eccentric individual Mum was.

What follows is a few cuttings from my personal scrapbook of recollections of the woman I used to insist when I was much younger was called originally called Rosemarie Jack and Jill Kirk.

My earliest story is not my memory, but a story Mum liked to tell me. As a small child, about three, I went through a bit of a biting period. As Mums story goes, we were living in Ireland, were round a friend of the families. Myself and their daughter were playing in the garden. At some point the girl comes into the house crying and saying “He bit me!”

Mum instantly charged out to the garden and took my hand and bit me, to the friends daughter saying in the background “Not Simon, the dog!” Once she had an idea in her head no-one was going to change it.

I did suggest for one of the pieces of music to be played today was the classic Dave Dee Dozy Mick and Tich’s “Bend It!”, but the spectacle of me trying to dance on a chair the way I did fifty years ago, that Mum was so fond of reminding me about, is probably something some of the younger people here should be spared from, even if I think I can still do it.

I still say the reason I was complimented on my dancing at a recent company Christmas party is because it was Mum who taught me to dance.

As Rob and Kay will remember, it wasn’t a family holiday without Mum falling flat on her face, or screaming and pushing Paul or I into a stream with the dead sheep she hadn’t noticed until that moment. I think that was Paul on this particular moment. I can’t count how many pictures I have of Mum lying face down in various different counties around the world, it was definitely a holiday tradition.

Everyone has a childhood picture they will never forgive their parents for. Mine has to be the one of Paul and I in matching Paisley shirts and ties, mine green, Paul’s blue, me at the age of nine in the garden in Germany. Mum loved that one.

Or the time she forgot to order something from the milkman and made me wear her dressing gown and slippers and shoving me after him so I had to run down the road in London to stop him and get him to come back. For those of you too young I’m sure you can find someone to explain what a milkman was.

I can’t hear Gilbert and Sullivan without thinking of Mum, especially certain of their operas. I still remember how proud Mum was when Grandpa tied all the rigging for her comic opera company when they did the Pirates of Penzance, when he was staying with us in Germany.

Some of you remember Mum won the Miss North West Phones competition when she worked for BT. My favourite moment from this period was when she was invited to the Post Office Tower and managed to get herself standing one on the static part of the restaurant floor and one foot on the revolving part of the floor so spent about twenty minutes scooting round the restaurant to stay in place, being introduced to people.

I look back with great affection on a whole period of television from when we lived in the new forest Roots to “I Clav Divs” (I Claudius) and so much more that we watched together. Anything with a certain historical period, mostly the Plantagenet’s were her favourite. It was very interesting to visit the national portrait gallery with her because she knew most of the “B” players as well as all the famous portraits, so could tell you this was so and so and the who they were a lover of.

Mum always said we shared a sense of humour, it was always her friends that were the funny, slightly strange ones, sorry Ray.

One of my personal favourite moments has to be when Mum, my Dad, and I went to see “Life of Brian”. If you can imagine the entire cinema is full of Python fans, and, my Dad. So the first film is the Python false travel film and it gets to the point where John Cleese is shouting and swearing about more bloody gondolas. The entire cinema is in tears apart from my Dad, who is sitting there saying things like “Well I don’t find that funny!” and “That’s really childish!” and so on. Mum and I couldn’t look at each other, he made it even more funny for the pair of us, bless him.

Finally we have to talk about what Jonathan calls her “I Don’t know what to do with the penguins” moments. In her later life she had that wonderful habit of looking like she was awake, only to have one of those bizarre little conversations about having put the blancmange in the wellington's but not being able to get them to stand for parliament.

I mention this because a couple of weeks ago when I visited her in hospital she had spent most of the day sleeping. She awoke briefly and looked at me and said “You know I do love you!” and I for probably the first time in my adult life didn’t fob her off with the usual “Me too Mum!” but actually said “I love you too Mum.”

“I love you too Mum”

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