The Good Funeral Guide

There’s a lovely story in today’s Mail about the funeral of a runaway solicitor, Andrew Paterson, who died from a heart attack on the beach at (nice way to) Goa.

Paterson was on the run from the old bill. Had been since 1987 when the long arm almost caught up with him in the matter of a bit of dodgy dealing.

Once abroad, Paterson changed his name to Mark Attwood and made a flagrant fortune building holiday resorts in exotic places. He married three times, fathered six children and was loved by all who knew him.

His last wish was to be buried in the churchyard of his tiny home village of Begelly in Wales. So his wife (#3) brought him home and all went to plan until… the coppers rocked up. Finally they had their man! They let the funeral go ahead, but intervened before he could be buried. They took Mr Paterson away for fingerprinting, for, in their own words, ‘Andrew Paterson failed to attend Guildford Crown Court on October 13 in 1987 to answer conspiracy to defraud charges and a warrant is still outstanding.’ Having made sure they’d got their man, albeit posthumously, they let the burial go ahead.

He must have been a hell of a good guy. His funeral was attended by every one of his six children and each of his three wives.

That’s his grave at the top. 

Full story here.

For no good reason I recall this Tommy Copper joke: The police arrested two kids yesterday. One was drinking battery acid, the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other off. 

The fog is swirling around us at GFG towers. Mellow fruitfulness has passed and the drear days of November have hunkered down around us.

We need cheering up and how better than with a great New Orleans Jazz funeral. It’s from 2007 and the life being celebrated is that of Kerwin James – New Orleans euphonium player. It’s looks chaotic, but sounds terrific. Watch out for the point where they where they rock the casket.

Winter break anyone?

The Daily Mail reveals rather unsportingly that East Enders junkies are going to be rewarded this Christmas day with the festive death from maybe cancer, possibly a heart attack, who knows, of the character known as Pat Evans. 

Here she is arriving at her funeral, above.

What is it about the British??

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916,
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fir o’er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that loyal heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?

The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you “The Cause?”
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Hat tip to Jailhouse Lawyer

If this makes you think about Six Feet Under it’s because that’s where you heard it. This song presently has us mesmerised and spellbound here at GFG HQ. We play it all day long. 

Santa Maria, Santa Teresa, Santa Anna, Santa Susannah
Santa Cecilia, Santa Copelia, Santa Dominica, Mary Angelica
Frater Achad, Frater Pietro, Julianus, Petronella
Santa, Santos, Miroslaw, Vladimir
And all the rest

A man is placed upon the steps, and a baby cries
High above you can hear the church bells start to ring
And as the heaviness
Oh the heaviness the body settles in
Somewhere you can hear a mother sing

Then it’s one foot then the other
As you step out onto the road
Step out of the road
How much weight? How much?
Then it’s how long and how far
And how many times
Before it’s too late?

Calling all angels
Calling all angels
Walk me through this one
Don’t leave me alone
Calling all angels
Calling all angels
We’re tying, we’re hoping
But we’re not sure how…

And every day you gaze upon the sunset
With such love and intensity
Why it’s…it’s almost as if
If you could only crack the code
Then you’d finally understand what this all means

But if you could…do you think you would
Trade it all, all the pain and suffering?
But then you’d miss
The beauty of the light upon this earth
And the sweetness of the leaving

Calling all angels
Calling all angels
Walk me through this one
Don’t leave me alone
Calling all angels
Calling all angels
We’re tryin’
We’re hopin’
But were not sure how…

Calling all angels
Calling all angels
Walk me through this one
Don’t leave me alone
Calling all angels
Calling all angels
We’re tryin’
We’re hopin’
We’re hurtin’
We’re lovin’
We’re cryin’
We’re callin’
‘Cause we’re not sure how this goes

Mourners at Jimmy Savile’s funeral earlier today. 

Business in bargain basement funerals is booming in Germany. Budget undertakers now enjoy 25 per cent of the market, up from 16 per cent two years ago.

A typical German funeral is comparable in cost to a British funeral: somewhere between £2,500 and £3,000. But the funeral price comparison website Bestattungen.de will quickly lead you to Sarg-Discount (translation: Coffindiscount), who will cremate you for as little as £412.89, and to budget undertaker Aarau, who will bury you for £860.

Old school German undertakers are not surprisingly hot under the collar about all this and respond in the language of undertakers the world over:  “Either there are hidden costs, or the body is treated without dignity,” warns Rolf Lichtner of the German equivalent of the NAFD. Whatever the truth of this, the image of budget funerals in Germany is somewhat tarnished by the fact that the ceo of Aarau, Patrick Schneider, is a former Stasi officer with a criminal record – just as the image of budget funerals in the UK has been besmirched by the activities of serial cheat and bungler Richard Sage.

German budget undertakers retort, of course, that dignity isn’t something that can be measured by the number of euros spent.

There may be an interesting sociological slant to this Teutonic trend. Dagmar Haenel, an anthropologist at the University of Bonn, thinks that cheap funerals reflect a contemporary throwaway mindset and reflect a divergence in the behaviours of different social classes, noting “We also have a rise in very individualised burials, sometimes very costly” by rich and educated people. “When it comes to funerals, the struggle of the classes is gaining ground,” she concludes. Here in Britain, on the contrary, a budget funeral is generally much more interesting to educated professionals than to working class people.

It would be impossible, in Britain, to get prices down to German levels. But there’s room at the bottom for sure. And how good it would be to see more people dispense with the customary trappings and trimmings and focus their attention instead on the principal business of a funeral, the farewell ceremony, an event where what is said and what is done matter most, and where what is spent is supplementary. Not only would the bereaved get much better emotional value for money, they would also be setting a good example.

More on budget German funerals here. 

Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander VI

By our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson

TV mini-series The Borgias stars Jeremy Irons as Renaissance Pope Alexander VI, nee Roderigo Borgia. Created by Neil Jordan of The Tudors fame, is a lavish period piece (winning this year’s Emmy for Best Costume) and is packed with racy plotlines involving power struggles, sex, assassinations and sibling rivalries.

As the portraits above and below reveal, the casting of Irons involved a degree of artistic license. The Venetian ambassador reported that Rodrigo Borgia’s corpse was “the ugliest, most monstrous and horrible dead body that was ever seen, without any form or likeness of humanity.”

After a week of intestinal bleeding and convulsive fevers, he died in 1503 at the age of 72. The swollen body began to release sulfurous gasses from every orifice, according to reports, and someone had to jump on the body to jam it into the undersized coffin.

Master of Ceremonies Johann Burchard elaborated: ‘The face was very dark, the color of a dirty rag or a mulberry, and was covered all over with bruise-colored marks. The nose was swollen; the tongue had bent over in the mouth, completely double, and was pushing out the lips which were, themselves, swollen. The mouth was open and so ghastly that people who saw it said they had never seen anything like it before.’

                                     Pope Alexander VI