Four months have passed since the last funeral I attended. You can read about it here. Last Wednesday there were two that I wanted to attend but they were happening simultaneously in different parts of London. I set aside most of the day to spend time at the commemorations and their aftermaths and brought my son with me.

He turned 19 earlier this month. He had noted more than once that the two funerals he had previously been to were for people who were born in the Chinese Year of the Monkey, as he was: an uncle by marriage on my father’s side of the family, and my father-in-law. The people whose lives were being celebrated this week were born in different Chinese Years, a Rabbit and a Dog.

The funeral service we went to was at the West London Crematorium, in Kensal Green Cemetery. I had never been there before. Peter, the man who died, was a friend of my sister’s. She drove my son and me to the cemetery and the three of us sat together at the back of the chapel used as an overflow. The main chapel, with the coffin and the celebrants, was already full. We watched proceedings on screens rather than in person.

Peter would have turned 60 next month. Last year, in this piece, I reflected on other people who died at 59, and included a list of over 20 of them. Peter lived a day longer than the founder of meteorology Robert FitzRoy (1805-65) and five days fewer than the singer Andrew Gold (1951-2011).

The other funeral taking place at the same time was at Mortlake Crematorium. There was no way of getting there from Kensal Green for any part of the service. Instead, we went to the pub on Chiswick High Road where most of the mourners were already gathered, the pub that I have spent more time in than every other pub on earth put together.

There were far fewer familiar faces than we were expecting. Most of the people we know had been to the Crematorium and they had either not made it to the reception or had not stayed long. The woman who had died was in her late 70s and would have recognized me and my son. One of her sons didn’t, unfortunately, and we were given something of an interrogation to establish exactly why we were there. This has never happened to me at a funeral before, but the family had just kicked out a couple of guys who had apparently gate-crashed the event. I had not met our interrogator (for want of a better word) for over 20 years, but his brother recognized us when we met him a few minutes later, so we were in the clear.

My son and I didn’t stay for long and went to the refreshments for the other funeral instead, at a social club in the shadow of Grenfell Tower, directly below the Westway. We were hoping to meet someone I hadn’t met since the 1980s, a friend of my brother’s. They met when they were teenagers. She had, entirely unconnected, become friends with my sister’s friend Peter. She was the first person we saw when we arrived at the social club, and we stayed until just before the event ended at 9pm.

I have been feeling distinctly mortal in recent weeks. In September I passed the age my mother was when she died. It has affected me in ways that I haven’t fully processed yet. At times in the past, attending a funeral for someone younger than me has given me a sense of resolve, not quite “a new lease of life”, but a greater focus on things I should be doing. After that funeral in July, as I noted in that earlier piece, I was determined to play live music as often as possible in venues all over London. I did so in the following weeks, around 50 performances in under three months. It was easier in the summer, with the children on their summer holidays and with my son accompanying me for many of those late nights, now that he is old enough to stay in pubs until closing time. This time round I have not felt the same sense of purpose. Perhaps it’s the time of year, and the weather. November, the Month of the Dead, has been mostly cold and wet so far. And the pub that set me on the path to all those performances in the summer, the pub in Harlesden where we gathered after the funeral in July, has now closed. I sang and played there most Tuesday nights from mid-July to mid-September but had not been there in the last two months. It turns out that it was losing too much money for the company that ran it to keep it open. Nothing lasts forever.