This last year seems to be trying to teach me a harsh lesson in the fragility of life. Just a couple of weeks ago my friend Charlie Marshall died, entirely unexpectedly. Today was his funeral.
I knew Charlie through playing badminton. My abiding memory is of him cracking jokes and us laughing. I wasn’t surprised that it was standing room only during the funeral service.
I don’t really know what to add at this point. To be petulant for a moment, I don’t want to have to write another blog post about someone dying. But then I can’t let this moment pass without note. So, rather than bang on pointlessly, let’s have something that Charlie would appreciate, a fishing joke:
An Irish priest loved to fly fish, it was an obsession of his. So far this year the weather had been so bad that he hadn’t had a chance to get his beloved wadders on and his favourite flies out of their box
Strangly though, every Sunday the weather had been good, but of course Sunday is the day he has to go to work.
The weather forcast was good again for the coming Sunday so he called a fellow priest claiming to have lost his voice and be in bed with the flu. He asked him to take over his sermon.
The fly fishing priest drove fifty miles to a river near the coast so that no one would recognise him. An angel up in Heaven was keeping watch and saw what the priest was doing. He told God who agreed that he would do something about it.
With the first cast of his line a huge fish mouth gulped down the fly. For over an hour the priest ran up and down the river bank fighting the fish. At the end when he finally landed the monster size fish it turned out to be a world record Salmon.
Confused the angel asked God, “Why did you let him catch that huge fish? I thought you were going to teach him a lesson.”
God replied “I did. Who do you think he’s going to tell?”