Bill Curbishley, manager of totemic Who drummer Keith Moon, has received an invitation from the London Olympics committee. They want Moon to play at the closing ceremony.
Curbishley said: “I emailed back saying Keith now resides in Golders Green crematorium, having lived up to the Who’s anthemic line ‘I hope I die before I get old’. If they have a round table, some glasses and candles, we might contact him.”
Germany is a world leader in crematorium technology, but its crematoria are finding it hard to cope with some of its XXL citizens:
The crematorium employee in the western German town of Hamelin took a last look at the coffin before pushing it inside the furnace. This was the third coffin he had processed on the morning of January 13, and the body itself weighed over 200 kilograms (440 pounds). Of that, only two kilograms of ashes were supposed to remain after cremation. But, 15 minutes later, flames shot out of the crematorium’s 10-meter-high (33-foot-high) stainless-steel chimney, and parts of it began to melt.
Unable to bring the fire under control, the employee called the fire department. Firemen determined that the smoking chimney was glowing at 600 degrees Celsius (1,100 degrees Fahrenheit). They cooled it from the side and used an infrared camera to track the spread of heat through the building. It took four hours to reduce the body in the furnace to ash.
It’s the high fat content that does it.
Firefighters responding to a fire at a crematorium in Hamburg in January 2008 even had to don protective breathing masks. The cremation of the body of an overweight man had led to a deflagration. The bypass flaps jammed and exhaust was unable to escape through the chimney. As a result, brownish smoke billowed through the building and the firefighters’ instruments showed high levels of toxic carbon monoxide.
To avoid spikes in pollution levels, a study by the Bavarian Environment Agency recommends placing coffins of particularly heavy corpses into the furnace “with the lid slightly open”.
Because there are so many crematoria in Germany, there is much competition between them. This has brought the cost of cremation down to £250.
Is anyone aware of similar fat-fire problems in UK crematoria? (We know all about the cost problems.)
Info source here.
Posted by Charles
Marvellous news from last Wednesday’s Telegraph:
The Duke Street consortium, which includes Babson Capital Europe and Metric Capital Partners, has acquired LM Funerals from Sovereign Capital, a buy-out firm focused on investing in small companies.
LM Funerals is the third largest funeral company in Britain, with more than 60 branches – mainly in the Midlands and the south-east of England.
Sovereign bought LM Funerals in 2003 and used the company as a platform to consolidate what is a highly fragmented sector. Under Sovereign’s ownership, the company grew from 29 sites to 65 through a series of nine acquisitions and several new branch openings.
You’ll like this next bit:
Often the acquired businesses continued to trade under their original names after the deals were completed. This was done to ensure the “preservation of trusted local reputations and relationships that have been built over a sustained period”. [Source]
QUERY: If consolidation of a highly fragmented sector is a Good Thing, why the reticence about ownership?
FOLLOWUP QUERY: No mention of the benefits for consumers? (Oh, them.)
FACT: Sovereign Capital paid £11m for LM in 2003. They’ve sold for £37.5m. The deal therefore represents a 3.4 x return.
FACT: The name of the managing partner of Metric Capital Partners is John Synic. Really.
THE GFG SAYS: Take the money and run, boys. Trebles all round!!
Hat-tip to Andrew Plume.
Posted by Charles
Over at the Heart of Mopsus blog, here, the Rector of Swanvale Halt took part in an Easter Friday Walk of Witness and reflected as follows:
Christians insist on publicly remembering a single, immensely violent event on a sunny Bank Holiday when everyone else is enjoying themselves; certainly most of my friends, to judge by Facebook which is the measure of all things, were doing and describing a variety of lighthearted activities while I was deliberately and voluntarily turning my mind to pain and horror.
The relationship between these different modes of feeling and thinking is complex. Our natural human tendency is to avoid the painful and problematic, quite understandably and rightly, and yet our understanding of who we are, what we are capable of, and what life can include, is superficial and incomplete if we spend all our time avoiding such dark elements of our common experience – and perhaps that even encourages us to avoid those who suffer, or misjudge them. As always, in my opinion, the Church has down the centuries got this wrong: but I think, by contrast with the heathen world growing up around it, the truth and rightness of the sacrifice of Christ is becoming clearer than ever.
Posted by Charles
In a decorous piece of invective in last Friday’s Daily Telegraph, Damian Thompson analyses the way people express grief today, and why:
A few weeks after the murders of the schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002, I stood in Soham parish church with the vicar, the Rev Tim Alban Jones. He had made an excellent impression in the media by asking the public to pray for the girls’ families while discouraging maudlin displays of “grief ”. But he’d only been partly successful. A corner of his church was piled to the ceiling with cardboard boxes full of soft toys – in memory of the dead girls.
The vicar pointed them out to me with a baffled expression. “Why do people send teddy bears?” he asked.
… … … …
As a nation we have developed an odd relationship with grief. It’s not just that we are fascinated by tragedies; we are deeply moved by our own reaction to them.
This is where those teddy bears come into the picture. The soft toys weren’t intended as comfort for the families of two horribly murdered girls. Their purpose was to provide emotional satisfaction for the people who sent them – a “personal” tribute to Holly and Jessica by members of the public who, a decade later, probably have difficulty remembering their names.
When Diana, Princess of Wales died, some critics were appalled by the “mourning sickness” symbolised by the mountains of flowers. That’s harsh, given that the public felt that they knew Diana. But there’s no getting away from it: some of those bouquets gave off the same aroma of narcissism as the teddies.
Although the vicarious grief over Diana was unusually intense, it was a classic demonstration of post-religious spirituality. The same goes for the outpouring of sympathy for Fabrice Muamba, a footballer few people had heard of before he collapsed.
Modern Westerners, including Christians, no longer believe in the supernatural in the taken-for-granted fashion of our ancestors. Confronted by major life events, we find solace in our own compassion. Visit a modern church, and you’re likely to find a smug congregation celebrating itself: a very secular impulse. And why did Ken Livingstone blub this week? Because he’d seen a film about his own benevolence – probably the closest he has ever come to a religious experience.