I mean, how soon?

My old dad was like that. "See you later," people would say and he'd reply: "When?"

He had a point.

Saying 'Goodbye' just like that has a sort of finality about it while 'Bye, bye' always reminds me of Harry Corbett appearing with Sooty on a grainy black and white telly.

"Say bye, bye to the boys and girls, Sooty."

This is a complete digression but I once had my hand up Sooty in Barnsley.

Matthew Corbett, son of Harry, had come to town in the Sooty Show and I was given the job of interviewing him.

He told me his dad used to take Sooty with him when they went on family holidays and one day set off, mistakenly leaving the glove puppet behind.

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Harry was so stressed out minus Sooty that he turned the car round and drove back to collect him.

He'd not said bye, bye properly, see.

My grandmother was a Primitive Methodist and she would leave such things in the laps of the gods. Or in her case, God.

"Bye, bye, see you soon," we would say and she'd reply: "See you tomorrow, if spared."

If spared. As a youngster it conjured up an image of God rolling a dice up there in Heaven every night and, depending upon how it fell, deciding whether people woke up again the next morning.

My grandmother was the type of woman who didn't presume anything, not even living another day.

That's scary when you're a kid.

If spared has a sense of fatalistic Victorian grimness about it, as if life is purely a random event.

These days I don't find it frightening and like to use it occasionally at the end of the day as a sort of a joke,

It causes some mild amusement but someone quipped back recently: "One day you won't be."

He had a point.

I've not said it so much since.

Goodbye is a difficult word to replace.

The best I ever heard was the salutation used by an undertaker in Suffolk.

I was working on a weekly newspaper in the Sixties and one of the jobs we had was to knock on the doors of the families of the recently deceased, talk our way over the doorstep and get a potted biography of the departed.

We reckoned it took half an hour to get a lifetime jotted down, hopefully with the aid of a cup of tea and some biscuits. It was damn good training but the practice has long ceased.

The names would be provided by the undertakers who would expect a little line at the bottom of the report to say who had handled the funeral. It was a fair trade.

One of the undertakers liked to call in at office to deliver his list of 'stiffs' personally.

He was a tall, cadaverous man with pale white skin and a very cold handshake. He was always seen in a long black coat and he went everywhere with a mournful air.

The cares of his job were not getting to him. He just felt that if people saw him laughing and joking they might not think him the kind of fellow they could do business with.

But once inside the office he was a different man.

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