23 November 2011 – The Good Funeral Guide

Police arrest dead man at his own funeral

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.

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.

Cremains of the day

We’ve always liked Daisy coffins. They’re a quality product and use a range of lovely looking, renewable materials: water hyacinth, banana leaf, wicker — imported, of course. The people at Daisy are nice, too.

Daisy don’t just make nice coffins, they also thoroughly understand design. They present themselves beautifully. They use an excellent graphic designer; their ads would look great in any glossy lifestyle magazine. And it’s all a bit wasted on their target audience, funeral directors, who are, of course, much more interested in things like price and whether they leak and creak. Funeral directors have a thing about creaky coffins.

Daisy don’t sell direct to the public. A great pity; they’d shift a few.

But they have just started selling urns direct to folk like us. We liked the look of them and asked us to send us one. They did — with a return postage sticker. We took it out to lunch to test reactions. Nobody reckoned it was an ashes container; one person thought it was a box of chocolates — encouraging for anyone wanting to transport ashes in a container which doesn’t shout Dead Man’s Dust at innocent bystanders.

The urn pictured above is from their leaf range. They do them in a variety of shapes and colours. They are made of cardboard decorated with dried leaves. They’re biodegradable, of course, if you want to bury — and reusable as a memory box, or whatever, if you want to scatter. At £35 they are nicely priced.

Check out the Daisy Memories website. They do other urns in all sorts of materials. Click here.

Note to cynics: no, they’re not paying us a penny to say this. We say what we like.