Read the paragraphs below and answer the questions.
It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.
1. Why is the opening line 'It was the day my grandmother exploded' so effective?
2. What does Uncle Hamish snoring at the funeral tell us?
I looked at my father, sitting two rows away in the front line of seats in the cold, echoing chapel. His broad, greying-brown head was massive above his tweed jacket (a black arm-band was his concession to the solemnity of the occasion). His ears were moving in a slow, oscillatory manner, rather in the way John Wayne's shoulders moved when he walked; my father was grinding his teeth. Probably he was annoyed that my grandmother had chosen religious music for her funeral ceremony.
3. What does the tweed jacket and black armband reveal about the father?
4. Why is the John Wayne simile for the father's jaw-grinding funny?
My younger brother, James, sat to my father's left. It was the first time in years I'd seen him without his iPod, and he looked distinctly uncomfortable, fiddling with his single earring. To my father's right my mother sat, upright and trim, neatly filling a black coat and sporting a dramatic black hat shaped like a flying saucer. The UFO dipped briefly to one side as she whispered something to my father. In that movement and that moment, I felt a sudden pang of loss for my grandmother. How her moles would be itching today if she was somehow suddenly reborn!
5. How does the writer use physical details to show James's discomfort?
6. Why does the genuine 'pang of loss' matter in this comedy passage?
7. Why does the writer extend the hat comparison from 'flying saucer' to 'The UFO'?