The GFG Blog
2008Nov
All hail to the Green Street Mortuary band!
Charles
Nov
20
No Comments
The best things in life have a signature tune, a tune forever associated with, and evocative of, a time, a place, a person — a soap. Funerals have signature tunes, too. As a celebrant, every time I hear Oasis’s Stop Crying Your Heart Out I think of the lad who
A celebration of life ceremony
Charles
Nov
19
No Comments
I’ve just enjoyed this blog post. It speaks for itself and it doesn’t want me climbing all over it. Read it here.
Absence from whom we love is worse than death
Charles
Nov
17
1 comment
Ask a hardline atheist if they want to be buried or cremated. Their response ought to be a predictable “I don’t care, my dead body won’t be me any more, I’ll have gone from being a me to an it.” But I’ve never met an atheist who didn’t express a
You couldn’t make it up
Charles
Nov
12
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You couldn’t make it up. The Express could, perhaps, given its record for libelling people. Here is the essence of their story in today’s paper. First, the headline: Three Orphans Sell Pets To Pay For Mum’s Funeral. Got yer pulse racing? It’s right up there on a par
People like people like us
Charles
Nov
10
No Comments
Saturday was National Bereavement Awareness Day. Miss it? Whoops. Let me fill you in. A brainchild of the independent funeral directors’ trade body, SAIF, the day was a marketing tool designed to raise the profile of independents. My local funeral directors, James Giles and Sons of Bromsgrove, held an open
Ghastly good taste
Charles
Nov
07
1 comment
One mistake this blog will never make: it will never engage in debates about taste. Each to their own, I say, all the while keeping my personal views encased in concrete behind a suave and serene demeanour. “We’re one but we’re not the same”, as my good friend Bono so
Forward backwards!
Charles
Nov
04
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My good friend the embalmer is not noted for halfway utterance, nor for half-tones in her vocabulary. She calls a spade a spade and hits you with it if she thinks you’re wrong, thwang thwang. She’s never less than invigorating. One of the themes she warms to hotliest is that
2008Oct
I must go down to the seas again…
Charles
Oct
24
No Comments
This blog is going to the seaside for a week in the firm conviction that there is more to life than death. It will spend some time hanging out with its embalmer friend, but its small talk is unlikely to be corpsecentric. No, it will be walking the windswept clifftops,
How different from US
Charles
Oct
23
1 comment
The effects of the crash have yet fully to register. Brits have always had a puritanical, penitential streak, a disposition to pare cheese, save string, make do and mend. Those who will be wiped out are to be pitied. The rest of us, I think, are strangely relieved that it’s
Fobbed off and let down
Charles
Oct
17
No Comments
There’s no rule of thumb that will help us find a good funeral director. The soulless efficiency of the firm that sells us car insurance suits us very well so long as it’s the cheapest. But when someone has died, what we look for is an intensely personal service, and
