The Last Post

Well, not the last ever post........

Just the last post of 2016......

And as this has been a year of  great sadness at much passing, let the title stand!

I heard The Last Post played on the bugle at St Anne's Church in Soho on Remembrance Sunday in November this year.

And with the help of Father Simon, and my friends from The French House Players (a group of professional actors who drink in that very fine establishment just across Dean Street from the church and who gather to perform rehearsed readings for charitable causes....), we read the entire list of names on the Parish War Memorial out loud just before the Two Minutes Silence.

This was the first time this has been done in living memory.

It seemed to me very apt in the centenary year of the carnage and slaughter on the Somme that this should be so.

The desperately sad, poignant and elegaic sound of the bugle has long since died away.

It seems to me important that, as the embers of the old year burn down, all those we left behind us in 2016 should also be commemorated.

And with their own, less martial, music...........

"Comes now the Spring thou shalt not see,

Alas!

We have sore miss of thee......."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38418802

So what to play for them?

We'll start with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X2Nvx--k1U

Now that, in my humble opinion , is truly beautiful.

What soul would not wish to waft heavenward accompanied by such as that?

Well...........

I can see Lemmy Kilmister, Rick Parfitt, Glenn Frey and quite a few other rock and rollers finding it a little less than sufficient unto the day......

So this is for them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI1ZUohNYS8

But this one is for Carrie Fisher: the saddest, for me, of all the losses we have sustained in this fell, fell year..........

I would say "Goodnight, Sweet Princess," but I know you hated that soubriquet.......

But "May flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest" anyway.........

And as you were both made crazy by a talent so bright it burned you, I'll let Miss Shepherd have the final word...... via Horowitz........ (the original Youtube clip from "The Lady in the Van" is no longer available.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLvrf_VpGao

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