Who's the Daddy: Smile raised during sad time

After you die, the people closest to you, probably your children, will go through your house like some sort of tomb raiders, stuffing 90 per cent of your possessions into bin bags and then slinging it all on the tip.

The only things spared from oblivion will be photographs, official documents and anything of sentimental or monetary value. They’ll be brutal, and they’ll need to be, because we’re all guilty of hoarding mountains of rubbish we don’t need.

And they will go through the lot in an afternoon. Separating it into piles, dividing up what’s left and deep cleaning the house before putting it on the market. I know all this because we’re going through it now after mum died last month. She was an extreme hoarder, years before extreme hoarders were a thing.

That’s not to say there haven’t been brief respites of levity, even if the humour has been of the gallows variety. While clearing out some stuffed-to-the-gills drawers, and just after stumbling across her will (if I could give one piece of advice after all this it is, for the love of God, make a will), I found a never-before-seen photograph taken on a family holiday in the late 1970s. It featured my nana, mum’s mum, who during her lifetime had many admirable qualities but was never prone to laughter and actively thrived on ill health, so much so my easy-going grandad called her Mrs Neverwell – she lived well into her 80s, he died just two years after retirement aged 67.

But there she was, eyes sparkling, grinning her head off in a holiday camp bar, sitting a wee bit closer than you’d expect to a tanned and toned young man dressed as Tarzan.

I’m guessing he was a friend/prop of a photographer who trawled the bars every night, taking pictures of tipsy and suggestible middle-aged holidaymakers for a few quid a shot, splitting the profits with Blackpool Pontins’ Lord of the Jungle.

There weren’t many chuckles while clearing mum’s house but that was as welcome as it was unexpected.