It’s a small world. ‘Byd bach’, my father and I will remark to each other, in our native Welsh tongue. In fact it is a really small world – ‘bach iawn byd’.

In my work as a funeral celebrant, I find that the world becomes smaller every day, for example, in the connections or links that I find I have in common with family when we meet. Maybe this is a place that we have both known or lived in or maybe it is the career we have shared.

And this was the case when Shoobridge Funeral Services had the real privilege (and I never use that word lightly) of meeting the family of John Wilson in Exmouth.

John had been a newspaper reporter and a sub-editor. He lived for the news (it had to be the BBC), and he could tell you all the football scores each Saturday from any match in any division.

As I often think after meeting families, I wish I had known John! My life was newspapers, too: I started off as a cub reporter on a weekly in the Midlands when I was 21, moving to Lincolnshire as sub-editor on a regional daily paper and then ending up down here as a sub on Devon Life before I changed direction and became a funeral celebrant.

And the world of regional newspapers is a small one. We all know someone who knows someone else! Even when I mentioned John’s name to Tim, our editor here at the Herald and the Journal, he said he was sure he knew the name, too.

I really enjoyed writing John’s service, making it feel like a news bulletin and a feature story all at the same time. And his three sons delivered such moving but also real and humorous eulogies, that the whole chapel felt a joyful place, full of gratitude and light. It was really beautiful.

The smallness of the world of journalism made me think of the smallness of other worlds, too. It becomes smaller for the families I walk alongside because bereavement is a small world. It can feel like everything else has crumpled, the light has left and it’s just one person standing there, alone and intolerably sad; a massive chunk of their lives has fallen away in the death of a mum or a dad, a grandparent or a son or a daughter.

I often feel that families become part of me. And I suppose this is why people often assume I am a member of the family, not a celebrant. We meet on such an unnaturally deep level and the bond in that fragile time happens at an accelerated speed from any other relationships or friendships.

And then there is the smallness of the world, too. When I was growing up and the Bosnia conflict was on the Six o’clock News, day after day, it seemed that that was a far-off conflict

and one I didn’t really relate to. Maybe it was because I was a child. But the escalating violence in the Middle East seems incredibly close and getting closer. Is it the rolling news channels and 24-hour websites and social media platforms that make this world smaller? The scale of the human tragedies, people just like us losing their entire worlds … it’s beyond devastating.

There is a smallness in our own worlds, a smallness in our neighbours’ worlds, a smallness in the big, wide world. ‘Byd bychan enbyd ydyw’ … it is a desperately small world.