THIS SPRING, when my husband’s best friend learnt that his illness was terminal, he couldn’t face many of the duties now expected of those dying young — filling memory boxes for his children, Hollywood-style “closures” with everyone he knew — but one task he could bear was choosing the music to be played at his funeral.

And so from the first doleful bar of Hey Jude in that sunlit chapel we felt his presence and our loss with a terrible, burning clarity. His lifelong Lancastrian loyalties: the Beatles, Gerry & the Pacemakers with You’ll Never Walk Alone from his beloved Kop, the Stone Roses’ Fools Gold echoing that Spike Island concert where he and his wife fell in love. Then the unbearable poignancy of Mama Kass’s Dream a Little Dream of Me chosen for his young daughters: “Say nighty-night and kiss me/Just hold me tight and tell me you’ll miss me . . .”

This friend was no believer, like so many of my generation. To us hymns are just half-remembered school songs; prayers are comforting but broken spells; God’s name has been sullied by hypocrites and zealots; death — we’re betting, though we hoped to be wrong — is no glorious hereafter but the great bugger-all.

Without faith, all we have is now, each other and the songs we grew up with, which embody our lives’ meaning, our love affairs and losses. What sounded profane to our parents is to us sacred. Pop is our only ceremonial music and, in the years to come, it will provide our unlikely requiems.

Reports this week that almost half of songs played at funerals are now contemporary focused on the grim egotism of My Way, the schmaltz of Céline Dion’s My Heart Will Go On or the crassness of the Crazy Frog to indicate society’s spiritual void. But this trend reveals not modern life’s meaninglessness but the opposite, a tireless quest for meaning.

Hymns are comforting, nostalgic and hopeful in their heavenly promise. But they bespeak a generic grief. Searching through popular music’s vast canon we are trying to pinpoint the exact and proper sentiment. And as Noël Coward wrote: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

A friend recalls her father’s church funeral with many glorious hymns but it was his favourite song, Lili Marlene, that finally released their tears. And I do not know why Ray Davies wrote the Kinks’ song Days, but since June it will only ever mean to me a young woman — our friend’s older daughter — bravely allowing her dying father to leave: “And though you’re gone, you’re with me every single day believe me . . .”

My parents, who have been to many funerals in their long lives, judge them principally on brevity. They like a short eulogy from the vicar, covering war record, job, progeny and hobbies — a whole life scratched on the back of an envelope — followed by a few verses of The Old Rugged Cross. That’s quite enough before the solace of strong tea and old friends. Anything more just prolongs the ordeal.

They were baffled when, after my aunt’s funeral, I became irritated by the minister. Why did he bang on so much about God? Why did he not talk more about my aunt? It felt like her day, and our sadness, was being co-opted into some Christian rally. Since my aunt was a devout churchgoer, I was being ludicrous. But then I am accustomed to modern weddings that are less a solemn promise before God and more a celebration of the taste and individuality of the couple. Funerals, too, are becoming ever more bespoke rituals, the very last “me” moments.

In good health, believing our death is entirely theoretical, who hasn’t planned one’s celestial desert-island discs? In 31 Songs, Nick Hornby chooses, after characteristic agonising, Van Morrison’s Caravan because if music “could be played over the closing credits of the best film you’ve ever seen . . . it means that it could also be played at your own funeral”.

But after June, and that most moving of ceremonies, I wonder if I might go easy on those I leave behind and have The Old Rugged Cross after all.

• AUTOMATED phone services are a much-documented curse. “The unacceptable transference of effort,” as Lynne Truss brilliantly put it. But I have never come across one so resolutely determined that you cannot get through to a human being than Ticketmaster. When ten overpriced panto seats, to see Sir Ian McKellen camp it up in the Old Vic’s Aladdin, hadn’t arrived after three weeks, I spent 30 premium phoneline minutes trying all known tactics to get put through to a real person — not pressing the hache key, not answering the robot’s question — but that just dropped me into another circle of techno hell.

  Finally I rang Ticketmaster’s customer services, which turned out not to be a salaried human being but another nice cheap robot. “Please state your problem.” No tickets. “For which event have you not received tickets?” Aladdin. “Thank you. Now searching for tickets to Coldplay . . .” If there is a worse company, let me know and I will gladly shame them.

• NOT SO LONG ago, a working mother would never dare admit that she had to leave early for a school play or was late because her nanny missed her bus. Better concoct some white lie about a client meeting. And it shows some social progress that both parents can now acknowledge that children, on occasion, take priority over work.

  But lately I’ve noticed how certain women seize upon their kids as an excuse for any kind of selfish behaviour. A minor celebrity I interviewed recently was an hour late, although I had dragged myself across London to a café just a block from her house. When she saw my face was not softened by her kittenish apologies — which no doubt work better on men — she blurted, “But . . . but, my baby was sick last night. And . . . I’m pregnant again.”

  This week an unbelievably rude e-mail arrived from an Australian magazine editor I’ve never met. She asked me to give a reference for an old employee. Except “asked” is the wrong word. “Barked” would be better, since there was no courtesy, let alone a “please”. When I e-mailed back that, since she wanted my time and help, she might be more polite, she blamed her rudeness on “running late to pick up her children”.

  Sisters, blaming your bad manners on your kids isn’t helping the cause one tiny bit.

  janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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