What I cooked last night.

There was a steady, distant hum of traffic on High Street as I entered the funeral parlour. Set well back behind its own car park lined with trees it was a pale square of a building, rendered white walls broken up by black glass.  The consultant, neat, efficient, fiftyish, was apologetic. We were sitting at an oblong table in the client room, a kind of reduced boardroom with sympathetic quotes on the walls and a water jug on the table and no ashtrays. Death!  The consultant’s laptop had crashed and all the details of the deceased had been lost. She left me to find some ghostly IT person in an office elsewhere in the building, and I gazed out the window at a garden bed humming with flowers. Beyond that, passing vehicles on High Street were blurred wraiths, their soft filtered whine fading in the mid-afternoon air.  Fifteen minutes passed. A gold-flecked shaft of sunshine fell on the carpet and crept up the leg of the boardroom table. Then the consultant returned, sombrely exultant at ha