Archive: 22 January 2011

There’s been a lot of interest in the US this week in what their media reckons to be a startling new trend. Owners of funeral homes, which over there are much roomier than ours, are reacting to shrinking profits – the impact of the rise in cremation and the slump in the economy – by hiring out their facilities to wedding parties and anyone else wanting to have a bit of a do.

The responses of the media are predictable enough – ‘creepy’ ‘bizarre’ etc – but it seems as if there’s been some uptake. I guess there has been some corresponding redecoration, too.

A good move, I’d say, likely to bring death back to life where it belongs.

In our own straitened times, as cuts begin to bite, the message for our crems couldn’t be clearer. Throw open your doors. Become a proper community resource. Pay your damn way.

Only good for goth weddings, of course, encircled as all crems are by tombstones and angels with one arm broken off at the elbow. But great gathering places for events of all sorts. Pity they can’t do food.

But they can start recycling their heat. Up here in Redditch they’re planning to pipe it down to the nearby sports centre. One local undertaker has already put the mockers on it. There’s a public briefing on Thursday. I shall join the citizenry, take the temperature and report back.