GUESS who’s died,’ said Aunty San. My cousin and I looked at each other.

‘Elvis,’ she said.

‘I thought you were going to say granddad,’ I said.

‘So did I,’ said my cousin.

‘I wouldn’t have said it as casually as that, would I?’ said my auntie.

It was 1977, I was on holiday in Guernsey, staying at her house on Les Genats estate (all the best folk have holidayed there) and this was the first time that I’d come face to face with mortality.

But it was mortality in general. It was something that happened to other people, namely unhappy rock ’n’ roll singers who ate deep-fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches.

The first time I came face to face with my own mortality was a few years later in geography class, while drawing a picture of a meeting hut of the Kalahari Bushmen. It wasn’t the actual hut that did it. Or the richly-shaded and lavishly detailed study of a bushman binding a spearhead to a pole with his teeth.

It was our geography teacher.

She looked really poorly. Her hair had gone thin and her nostrils leaked and her glasses looked too heavy for her face to hold up.

I can’t remember whatever happened to her but that day I wandered around in a melancholy stupor which wasn’t even alleviated when friends broke Trevor Barlow’s wrist while giving him the bumps.

It was his 13th birthday and, in retrospect, it must have been a lousy one because the poor kid spent it in accident and emergency having a cast (or pot, as they are called in Yorkshire) plastered onto his arm.

Happy birthday, Trev.

I went into my last English exam in a black suit and baseball boots and everyone laughed.

‘Where y’off t’ after y’exam, Shack, a cocktail party?’

When I said I was going to a funeral they all shut up.

It was a warm, breezy summer’s day at an ancient church overlooking Oxenhope. The purple heather glowed like vineyards on the moors.

Afterwards, at her boyfriend’s house, we played Jamie’s Crying by Van Halen. Her favourite song.

That night we all went to a party and stayed there for a week.

I missed my Granny Tost’s funeral because my parents didn’t know where I lived.

I’d just started living with a girl in a converted potting shed at Ponden Hall, the building that was supposed to be Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights.

The place where Cathy, during one of her moonlit, barefoot wanders, peers through the windows and sees all the rich folk inside dancing and laughing.

The shed was nothing like that. It had no front door so we had to climb through the window to get in and there was no hot water.

One Friday, when we’d caught the last bus at the end of the reservoir down to her sister’s for our weekly bath, there was a message to call my dad.

He broke the news on the phone and told me my mum had flown to Guernsey as soon as she’d heard.

The girl and I talked about selling some of our stuff, hitching down and catching the ferry over.

But all we had to sell was a portable black and white TV and a suede jacket.

And that wasn’t enough even for one ferry fare.

Granny Tost never got to meet the girl, who later became my wife, or the grandkids who came later.

Granny Shack’s funeral I also missed and the strange thing was it was the reverse of Granny Tost’s. We were in Guernsey and we couldn’t leave our seasonal jobs at such short notice.

She was cremated at Oakworth, then scattered at the Knowle Garden of Rest, all arranged by the Co-op.

She would have loved the joke about it taking a lot of stamps.

We all turned up at my auntie’s flat and the first thing she said was: ‘Guess who’s died?’

This time with certainty I could say ‘Granddad’, but it turned out to be Freddie Mercury.

Now, forever linked in my mind, is a quiet, extremely private Yorkshire cobbler-cum-under-the-counter-bookie-cum-bingo-caller with a built-up boot and a fast-living, moustachioed rock star who brought opera to the masses.

He [Granddad Tost] had been going since he was 15, so we always joked about The Ritz being his second home. But it was really his first.

It certainly was the last place he ever saw: he died in the public bar on the first day of the West Show, 1997.

So after the service, where I read out something I’d written, that’s where we had his wake.

It was like any other Saturday afternoon in The Ritz in the old days except that most people were wearing a suit.

My cousin drove Uncle Hedley to fetch his accordion and there was a singsong.

It went on until last orders and, as I said, it was just like the old days. Except for the suits and one other thing. Granddad Tost wasn’t there.

That set a precedent, because for every funeral I attended afterwards – my dad’s, where the procession was slowed down by a horse (my dad, in his dad’s footsteps, was a bookie), my cousin Caz’s, where Love Shack by The B52s played as the coffin slid in, and my Uncle Barry’s, where they put a sheet of ply over the pool table of his local, The Friendly Inn, and had a buffet – I wrote and read out something.

And it was an honour to be asked to do so.

I hope that I’ve not sounded too maudlin – or too flippant.

I’m not a believer in the great hereafter. The here and now can be equally unbelievable and not always all that great.

I know it won’t always happen, but I’ve managed to raise a smile at every funeral I’ve been to.

Firstly because it was what they would have wanted and secondly in appreciation of what they did for me: made my life better.

I love and miss every one of them every day.