Today I attended Colin Harvey’s funeral in Bath. It was a lovely location out on the edge of town with magnificent views out over the Somerset countryside. I was very impressed by the whole thing. Here’s a brief review.

The first thing I noticed was that the place was packed. There was barely room for all of us to sit down. There were very few SF people there. Besides myself we had Gareth Powell and his wife, Jo Hall and her partner, Roz Clarke, Tony Keen who had come up from Kent for the day, and Rob Rowntree who, I think, had come down from Nottingham. In addition there were a few people from the creative writing course that Colin was taking at Bath University. There were also people from the Bristol hospital where he worked, old colleagues from Uniliver, and quite likely a lot of other people as well; besides family, of course.

Although the crematorium had clearly been built with religious ceremonies in mind, Colin’s, by family request, was entirely secular, and the staff did a wonderful job of carrying that out. We arrived to the sound of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”, which summed up Colin perfectly. During the ceremony they played “Chasing cars” by Snow Patrol, and we left to the sound of Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” (which Kate told me Colin used to play when writing). The funeral director read some of the tributes to Colin that had been posted to Facebook, and also two poems, the details of which I’m afraid I have forgotten. The second poem encouraged us all not to cry, and consider the departed lost forever, but instead to smile and remember all of the good times we’d had together. Again that was perfect for Colin.

After the funeral, donations were taken for the Above & Beyond medical charity, which Colin worked for. If you’d like to remember him in some way, please consider making your own donation.

And then, exactly as Colin would have wanted, we all went to the pub.