My beautiful Mum asked me if I would drive her up to Sunderland one weekend to scatter My Nana’s, her Mum’s ashes. Of course, after all she couldn’t drive herself, I’ve stolen her car 🙂

Now this request was made around eight months ago, so I assumed that my Mum had researched the scattering of ashes at the Garden of Remembrance in Sunderland, which is around an hour and half drive away from home.

The journey up there was uneventful. We arrived at the crematorium at lunch time. It was Saturday so it was fairly quiet. I thought I should have a quick look on the Garden of Remembrance’s website to check if it was okay for us to just scatter ashes there…

Me:  “Mum it says here that you’ve got to have special permission from the council to scatter ashes here”

Mum:  “Yeah, I know”

Me:  “Okay. Do we have permission”?

Mum:  “No”

Me:  “Right…so what’s the plan?”

At this point my Mum produced a tiny trowel from her bag.

Me: “And what’s the trowel for?”

This was the reaction to that question…

My Mum’s “plan” was for us to trowel some ashes here and there without being seen…possibly down our trouser legs, Great Escape (1963) style.

As much as I’ve always wanted to pretend that I’m Steve McQueen (who hasn’t?), I had a better idea. Lets just ask!

So as my Mum and Christopher ran off and hid I approached the ‘security guard’, whose response to my ashes scattering enquiry was pretty much ” Yeah, do what you like”.

So we did 🙂 We found a nice quiet little spot under a tree and said goodbye to Nana Cora. No trowels or trousers necessary. ∞♥