The GFG Blog
2010Jan
Finding Valhalla
Charles
Jan
12
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A friend writes. She is to be interviewed for the talking wireless. They’re going to want her take on Viking funerals. What, she wonders, are my views on Viking funerals? Can you, I wonder, help? Interesting territory. We think of the classic Viking funeral as a blazing longship, bearing the
Too good to be real
Charles
Jan
12
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I have tried, in the Good Funeral Guide, not to cover topics already dealt with by others. Instead, I have incorporated lots of signposts to best sources of information and best archives of resources – poems, music, ceremony ideas. There’s lots of stuff out there about eulogies, most of it
Adventurous ashes
Charles
Jan
11
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When Ralph B White died two years ago his friends at the Adventurers Club of Los Angeles set about taking portions of his ashes to all manner of furthest flung parts of the globe. “Rather than have people mourn him, he wanted to give people incentive to go have adventures,”
Counting the cost
Charles
Jan
07
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Here in the UK we are all following, intently or wearily, the furore created by the declaration of intent by Anjem Choudary and Islam4UK to hold a procession through the streets of Wootton Basset “not in memory of the occupying and merciless British military, but rather the real war dead
Exhuming the past
Charles
Jan
07
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Far and away the most powerful image of 1979’s Winter of Discontent, when one and a half million public sector workers went on strike, was that of the dead lying unburied. There’s a peculiar horror in that; it blends dishonour with decomposition most potently. Bloated rubbish bags, bloated corpses. Bluebottles.
You can look at her feet sticking out right here
Charles
Jan
06
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“America,” said Oscar Wilde, “has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.” I don’t want to give offence to any of my many US readers. But for people in the UK who sometimes get frustrated with the way we do funerals over here, it’s worth reflecting that
Websites where you can plan your own funeral
Charles
Jan
05
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A cheerful email arrives from Sue Kruskopf, telling me that I ought to know about her do-it-yourself funeral planning website My Wonderful Life, of which she is the co-founder. It was “created after the death of my co-founder’s husband. It is free and you can not only plan your own
Sex and death
Charles
Jan
04
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I’ve never been able to get the connection between sex and death. I once met an academic at a conference who was heavily into it, but in a visceral rather than a cerebral way, so it seemed. That there’s a whole psychopathology here is not in doubt. It’s passed me
Great photo
Charles
Jan
04
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Here’s a wonderful funeral picture taken at the obsequies in Canada of Mafia boss Nick Rizzuto, gunned down last Monday. Click it to make it bigger. And here’s his gangster-chic gold coffin:
