Nan the Great

So, Nan lived to meet three directly descended great-grandchildren and enjoy being able to have conversations with a teenage step-great-grandchild. Somehow, being a great-Nan she became known among her youngest descendants as Nan the Great, and quite right too. She predated the Russian Revolution by 8 years and outlived the Soviet Union by 21. Her aunt once met someone who could remember seeing the fleet return from Trafalgar. Less than a fortnight before she was born, Blériot flew across the English Channel, and within three quarters of Nan's total lifetime, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Well into her seventies, she was jetting around the world herself.

100 years, 6 months, 12 days.

Nan loved to socialise and to network. Even when she broke her leg in her nineties, it took just minutes to establish that she knew the mother of the ambulance lady. Her friends were all of a similar background and nature to her – impeccably upper middle class and by today's standards very often quite dotty.

The family fortune was a memory but the breeding and manners lived on, combined with flashes of attitude from a bygone era. When hospitalised for a period a few years ago, she could still unblushingly refer to her doctor of Asian descent as a little brown man. (For the record she had often had people of similar ethnicity to stay as house guests.) Her idea of an ideal conversation was one that wittered on and on and on and preferably didn't touch on anything at all that's important. Any attempt to make it relevant or meaningful had to be resisted by dragging in yet another anecdote about someone no one but the speaker had ever heard of who did something utterly unimportant. I spent a lot of my prep school weekends with Nan; it may be why I find it very easy to stay silent and generally tune out if the point of a conversation isn't at least looming on the long distance radar after about a minute.

But let me not for a minute do her down.

My grandfather spent most of World War 2 in the Far East fighting the Japanese and having a whale of a time. Nan's memories of the war were always less rosy. His rather tactless letters back home were full of news about what fun he was having and very short of any share of the money he was earning to help keep his wife and child. So she crossed the Atlantic twice with her young daughter during the U-boat crisis, seeking a better life in Canada, not finding it and coming home again. Peacetime did nothing to reduce the long separations. She would have looked at today's 6-month tours of duty in Afghanistan and laughed a hollow laugh. After the war she found herself having to raise a mentally handicapped son; and when Granddad had a stroke in the 1960s she had to look after him too. She can be forgiven some quirks.

The funeral was held yesterday, in the Trinity Chapel of Salisbury Cathedral, where she had spent many years as a guide: quite by coincidence it was 35 years to the day after her husband's own send-off. It was the first decently sunny day for ages and the chapel, the pointy bit at the end of the building, is light and airy and full of space – the perfect setting. The music of the organ filled an almost empty cathedral, which has always looked good but at lunchtime on a term-time weekday looks absolutely stunning.

Nan's first intimations of mortality began over a decade ago when my parents went to New Zealand for a few weeks and Nan became convinced she wouldn't last until they got back. So, I was summoned to discuss her funeral arrangements with the then Vicar of the Close, who could barely keep a straight face at this obviously hale and hearty old lady convinced her time was nigh. All that really came away from that meeting was (a) no, she did not want "Candle in the Wind" and (b) I was to select and read a suitable Bible passage – she trusted my judgement and would be in no position to complain if she didn't like it. We managed both of those stipulations, and the passage in question was 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Being able to say "We believe that Jesus died and rose again", with your amplified voice echoing around a cathedral, is a powerful experience.

I also designed the order of service for the funeral, which she might just have understood as a concept; and I downloaded an MP3 of "The Road to the Isles" from Amazon to burn a CD to play at the Committal, which I would never have been able to explain to her in a thousand years. I mention all this because she was the one who set me on the path to computer literacy in the first place, by giving me the money for my 21st birthday with which I bought my first computer, my faithful and beloved Amstrad PCW. She was in tune with the modern world enough to ask me once to demonstrate 'an internet'. I chose the National Rail website as most likely to be understood as something useful. I asked her to name a town. "Salisbury." I asked her for another. "Portsmouth." I asked for a date. "Tomorrow." Click, click, click ... And behold, I could show her that there was a train from Salisbury to Portsmouth at 10.30 the next day.

"Well, I knew that," she said and thereby dismissed the Internet revolution from her consideration.

She might have enjoyed the slideshow at the reception afterwards: a PowerPoint montage of pictures that ran on a couple of laptops, showing photos of her from babe in arms to old lady in receipt of her telegram from the Queen (who looks almost equally grumpy in her picture). I had a brief crisis of conscience in assembling the pictures: should I include the arty one of her in her twenties, tastefully naked sitting on a rock by the sea (which really can't have been very comfortable)? Tact won out over truth: besides, there were a lot of her contemporaries among the guests and I wouldn't have wanted them on my conscience.

RIP, Nan, and I promise not to tune out when we meet again.