Drew Baxter - Celebrant.

Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom — Feeding the Beast

I received a message recently from someone who had been deeply affected by a story in the news.

He wondered whether I might write something about it.

I won’t name the person at the centre of that story. I don’t know enough about what happened, but the official post mortem and the unofficial one, are in full swing and I have little—if anything—to add to the arguments already taking place.

But the message left me thinking about the way we consume news.

There was a time when newspapers appeared once or twice a day and television news occupied a few scheduled minutes. Now the news never stops. It rolls endlessly across television screens, websites and phones.

But a twenty-four-hour news machine must constantly be fed.

And some people use that fact as a weapon to attack others. Make someone else the story - not me.
That’s because they know that a story cannot simply be reported.

It must be updated, revisited, analysed and discussed. Every available detail must be uncovered. Every silence must invite speculation.

Every human life at the centre of it must become an unfolding drama with heroes, villains and spectators choosing sides.

It would be easy to point the finger solely at journalists and editors. But the uncomfortable truth is that the rest of us feed the beast too.

We click. We share. We speculate. We demand another development, even when nothing meaningful has changed. We consume the distress of people we have never met and call it keeping informed.

Good journalism matters.
People in positions of influence should be questioned, wrongdoing should be investigated and institutions should be held accountable.

That is why journalism has traditionally been guided by an important test:
Is publication in the public interest?

But somewhere along the way, perhaps we began confusing the public interest with what interests the public.

They are not the same thing.

The fact that we want to know does not automatically mean that we need to know. Nor does it mean that every private detail should become public property or that scrutiny must continue until a person has been reduced to little more than the accusations attached to their name.

Behind every headline is a human being.

Around that human being are families, friends and others who live with consequences long after the rest of us have clicked on the next story.

We can demand better from the media. We should.

But perhaps we must also demand something better from ourselves.

Before we click, share or join the latest public prosecution, we might apply our own public-interest test:
Do I genuinely need to know this?
Or do I merely want to?

Good morning and welcome to Wednesday.

For more than twenty-one years I’ve stood at the front of funeral services.

Occasionally, after the event, a beautiful card would arrive in the post or via the funeral director.

Sometimes there’d be a heartfelt letter.

Every now and then someone would write a kind comment on Facebook.

Those things were always appreciated.
Deeply appreciated.

But the truth is, most of the time… nothing arrived at all.

For years I wondered whether that meant I’d somehow fallen short.

Had I said the wrong thing?
Missed something important?
Could I have done better?

Then, gradually, I realised I’d been asking the wrong question.

Not everyone expresses gratitude with words.

Some people simply go home and hold their family a little closer.

Some quietly visit a grave a week later.

Some begin to laugh again.

Some find the strength to get through tomorrow.

They don’t write to tell you, they just carry on living.

Perhaps that’s all the thanks anyone could hope for.

As I prepare to retire and spend more time writing, recording podcasts and sharing my thoughts online, I find myself carrying that lesson with me.

Of course I’ll smile if someone leaves a lovely review or writes a kind message. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.

But I don’t want to spend my time measuring what I do by likes, comments or reviews.

I’d much rather believe that somewhere, someone has made another cup of tea before the episode ended.

Or lingered a little longer in the garden.

Or wandered without quite so much hurry.

Or rediscovered a little wonder in an ordinary day.

I’ll probably never know if those things happened.
There won’t be a notification to tell me.
But perhaps that’s rather the point.

The most meaningful things we ever do often leave no visible trace at all.

So I’ve decided that, from now on, I’m not aiming for comments.

I’m hoping, instead, for contentment.

Not just my own…
…but yours too.

Conversation, not content.
Contentment, not comment.

Have a lovely day.

Wednesday Wisdom – Holding the Threads

The Bayeux Tapestry has returned to Britain for the first time in almost a thousand years. It goes on show to the public on 10th September.

Seventy metres of stitched history, carrying the faces of kings, soldiers, sailors and ordinary people from a world long gone.

It has survived centuries of movement, conflict and human carelessness.

The cloth has aged. Some of its threads have weakened. Parts of its story may even have been lost. And yet it remains; carefully protected, because generation after generation has understood that those threads matter.

It made me think about another tapestry.

One that could never be hung in a museum because it exists only within us.

The artistic tapestry of our lives.

It begins forming when we are young, although we don’t realise it at the time.

An actor appears on the television in the corner of the room. A singer’s voice comes through the radio. A familiar piece of music tells us that a favourite programme is about to begin.

They entertain us for half an hour or accompany us through a summer, and then life carries on.

But somehow, without our noticing, a thread has been added.

Years later, we hear that one of those familiar figures has died.
We didn’t know them. They didn’t know us. And yet the news brings a small, unmistakable sadness.

Perhaps we are not mourning them alone.

Perhaps we are mourning the room in which we first saw them. The house in which we once lived. The people who sat beside us.

Perhaps we are remembering an earlier version of ourselves who believed that all of it—and all of them—would be there forever.

It isn’t always the great stars who leave the strongest threads.

Sometimes it is the character actor whose name we never learned but whose face we knew immediately. The dependable police inspector. The formidable aunt. The kindly doctor. The suspicious neighbour.

They populated the imaginary world of our childhood. They became part of its furniture.

A voice can return us to a journey taken long ago. A song can restore an entire summer. A few notes of theme music can rebuild a living room and, just for a moment, bring back someone who once sat beside us.

That is the extraordinary thing about art.

It does not merely help us remember what we watched or heard.
It helps us remember who we were.

Lately, I have sometimes felt that the artistic tapestry of my youth is beginning to unravel. Familiar faces are disappearing. Familiar voices are falling silent. One by one, the people who coloured the landscape of my younger years are leaving it.

But perhaps I have been looking at it the wrong way?

The Bayeux Tapestry has survived because, generation after generation, someone understood that it had become their turn to care for it.

Perhaps that is what happens to us as we grow older.

The tapestry does not disappear.

It passes into our care.

The faces, voices and music are still there, stitched to rooms and people and moments we once thought ordinary.

We become the ones who hold the threads.
The ones who remember.
And, when we can, the ones who pass the stories on.

I guess that's what I've tried to do for 21 years...

Addendum

One final thought.

The Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of kings and battles, victories and losses, of lives crossing for a brief moment before the thread moves on.

For so many years, I’ve had the privilege of being woven, for a little while, into the tapestry of thousands of lives.

It has been an honour beyond anything I ever expected, and one I shall always carry with gratitude.

But every tapestry has a point where one thread ends and another continues.

So, on the last day of August, I shall quietly retire from the field.

Not, thankfully, with an arrow in my eye… just with a heart full of memories and an overwhelming sense of gratitude.

And yes… this time, it’s for good.

Thank you for letting me be part of your story.

My cruise reflections. Not my usual take but the fjords were a place that awakened poetry not my usual humour. Forgive me but perhaps you still might enjoy?

Bonus Chapter - Small Pond on a Large Pond - Big Skies and Small Ponds...with Drew Baxter Bonus Chapter –Small Pond on a Large PondWe often imagine that travel is about seeing bigger places and grander sights. But perhaps that’s not quite right.Join me aboard a ship in the Norwegian fjords as I discover that even among towering mountai...

We’re having difficulty with the Bereavement Cafe page but I can confirm we will be open as usual on Monday morning. Hope to see you there. If you need more details please do get in touch

Wednesday Wisdom – The Courage of Silence

People often imagine that a funeral celebrant is someone who stands at the front of a service and knows exactly what to say.

I wish.

But as insecure as I can be about finding the right words, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the past twenty one years, is knowing when to stop talking.

There are moments in every service when words become too small.

A daughter reaches out for her father’s hand one last time. A hand she can no longer hold but still feels.

A husband quietly rests his hand on the coffin.

A grandchild places a drawing beside someone they adored.

No poem, no quotation and no carefully crafted sentence can improve those moments. In fact, they can sometimes get in the way.

So you wait.

I often think the most crucial part of my work is giving families permission to do very little….and to let silence do what words cannot.

Perhaps that’s because I’ve never believed the ceremony is about me.

There can be a temptation in any profession to demonstrate our skill; to add another story, another quotation, another flourish simply because we can. But I’ve come to believe that the best celebrants aren’t performers. We’re simply conduits.

Our job isn’t to stand between a family and the person they’ve lost.

Our job is to help them find each other one last time.

That means quietly setting our own ego to one side.

It means resisting the urge to improve a family’s words simply to show how clever we are.

Sometimes what they’ve entrusted to us is already enough.

Our responsibility is to carry it with care, not decorate it.

That’s where silence comes into play.

Maybe the question we should ask ourselves after a service is not, "What did I do for this family?" but "What did I allow this family to do for themselves?"

Silence isn’t an absence of love. It’s often love at its fullest. It gives people room to breathe, to remember, to cry, to smile, or simply to be.

Perhaps that’s true beyond funerals as well.

We spend so much of life trying to fill every pause with conversation, advice or explanation. Yet some of the kindest moments we can offer another person are the quiet ones, where we simply sit beside them and allow them to know they’re not alone.

Sometimes the greatest gift we can give isn’t another sentence.
Sometimes it’s a moment of peace.

Welcome to Wednesday.

Yes, I'm back. Just for a few weeks.

The last few months have given some of you a nice break from my ramblings, whilst 2 or 3 of you bit the bullet and had a listen to the podcast. Thank you.

During my time away from this place I have been on a cruise and yet for the first time I came back not with too many stories of people but more about the scenery.

Maybe my perspective has changed...a little.

Anyway this week I will share a short simple story about the cruise and some wisdom I know I've shared before - but good advice is always worth repeating.

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Good morning.

Well… I’m back.

I’ve unpacked...well Mrs B has.

The washing machine has been working overtime.

The scales have looked at me with a mixture of disappointment and resignation, and I keep opening the fridge expecting somebody else to have thought about lunch.

Cruises do that to you.

Within a few days you begin to think it’s perfectly normal for someone to make your bed while you’re eating breakfast. You leave a towel on the floor and, by some mysterious bit of maritime magic, it returns folded into the shape of something with ears.

You never have to ask, “What’s for tea?”

The answer is always, “Whatever you’d like.”

And I have to confess, I become rather fond of that lifestyle.

There’s another change too.

By the end of a cruise, you've stop noticing what you’re eating and start noticing who’s bringing it.

Every evening we were looked after by a waiter called Nelson.

Now, I could tell you he was efficient. He was.

I could tell you he remembered our likes and dislikes, our little routines and whether we’d decided to be sensible or have pudding.

He did all of that.

But what I remember isn’t the service.

It’s the conversation.

Between serving tables, he told us about home. About his little daughter. He showed us her photograph with the sort of smile that only appears when someone mentions the person they love most in the world.

And suddenly my holiday looked rather different.

While I was sitting there deciding whether I really ought to have another dessert, there was a little girl counting the weeks until Daddy came home.

It doesn’t make the holiday less enjoyable.

In fact, it makes it richer.

Because you begin to realise that every smiling face around you belongs to someone with a life beyond the ship.

There’s Muzi, whose warmth seemed effortless but wasn’t effortless at all. There’s Miroslav, whose dry humour appeared with dry rose wine, exactly when it was needed.

There are cabin stewards, bartenders, cleaners, musicians, engineers and chefs, each carrying a story you’ll probably never hear unless you stop long enough to ask.

And perhaps that’s true everywhere.

The young man stacking shelves in the supermarket.

The woman delivering your parcel.

The lady serving coffee.

The gentleman collecting your bins.

Most of us pass them without a second thought, not because we’re unkind, but because we’re busy.

Yet every single one of them is somebody’s son or daughter.

Somebody’s husband or wife.

Somebody’s mum.

Somebody’s dad.

Somebody who is loved.
Somebody who is missed.
Somebody trying their best, just like the rest of us.

It struck me that names change things.

The moment someone stops being “the waiter” and becomes Nelson… or “the delivery driver” becomes Jack… or “the lady in M&S ” becomes Pip… something shifts.

They’re no longer part of the background scenery of our day.

They’re people.

Real people.

And I wonder if the world would feel just a little kinder if we all made the effort to notice one more person this week than we did last week.

Not in some grand, life-changing way.

Just enough to say hello.

To smile.

To ask how they are.

To thank them.

Because kindness often begins with something astonishingly small.

A name.

That’s all for this Wednesday.

And remember…

If you’re lucky enough to meet one of the people I've talked about...learn their name.

2 years. We didn’t know how it would work out but my goodness how it’s worked out is wonderful.
I wasn’t firing on all cylinders today but being there and hearing people chatting away…marvellous medicine. Plus there was cake! Thank you everyone who supports the cafe and biggest thanks to those who attend. X