In defence of Thomas Lynch
If you follow trends in US funerary practice you’ll know about the work of the Funeral Consumers Alliance. Its aims are laudable: to inform and empower consumers, a cause dear to the heart of the Good Funeral Guide. Its means, sad to say, often demean and discredit it, especially the ill-judged rhetoric of its executive […]
Victory V
A little while ago I posted a blog about online memorial websites. I didn’t post all I wrote. I decided that the second half was grossly offensive and I deleted it.Here’s what I wrote: Do the online memorial sites that are up there presently give visitors enough to do? Possibly not. So, to all entrepreneurial […]
All hail to the Green Street Mortuary band!
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 died at Glastonbury: Hold up […]
A celebration of life ceremony
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
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 preference, an insistence, even, and […]
You couldn’t make it up
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 with Headless Waiter Found In […]
People like people like us
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 day. They’ve recently refurbished, so […]
Ghastly good taste
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 sagely sings. So right, Bono. […]
Forward backwards!
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 of the present reinventing the […]
