Bottling up the emotions

Chris Bryant | Issue 4 | Comment, Magazine

From the Archive

Richard Coles’s moving account of his partner’s death would benefit by exploring the havoc alcohol can wreak on families

The Reverend Richard Coles is a national treasure. He jokes about it in the best self-deprecatory English manner and he knows that, like every other treasure, he has cracks and flaws. In his equally well-written two previous books of autobiography, he showed himself warts and all. And in that sense this book is no different. He is as gorgeous and infuriating as ever. He is painting on a much smaller canvas this time. This is the story of the short period in his life framed by the day his life partner, the Reverend David Coles, was taken into Kettering General Hospital, 13 December 2019, and the day of David’s funeral in Finedon on 3 January 2020. As the title suggests, it’s about Richard’s grief, but because the canvas is so small you get engrossed by the minutiae. Small practicalities take on a bigger significance. Hospital niceties. What to do with the five dogs. The “sadmin” of registering the death. The Anglo-Catholic rituals of a funeral pall “in midnight blue and purple… like a k...

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