6 August 2012 – The Good Funeral Guide

No death, please, we’re British

6 August 2012

Charles

6 Comments

Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, coffins

Here’s one of those nimby stories that cause funeral directors such headaches. The setting is suburban Horsham, Sussex.

A mother who recently cured her phobia of coffins has shared her fears about the establishment of a funeral directors near her home. Katie Lee, 37, said she was ‘gob smacked’ by ‘inconsiderate’ signs ‘suddenly’ erected on the old carpet shop on the corner of Rusper Road and Agate Lane, Horsham, informing residents that it will soon become a funeral directors.

Katy Lee said she was “physically sick” after learning the parlour was opening in her street. The 37-year-old has missed friend’s funerals because of her taphophobia, which stems from when her father was buried. She spent hundreds of pounds tackling it through therapy but said she was not prepared to see if she was fully over her fear by actually seeing a coffin. “I told my husband about it. I said, ‘we’ve got to move’ and we’ve just done up the house. But he said no. I can’t move.”

Dignity area manager Matthew Keysell … pointed out that … the transfer of any coffin from the hearse to the building would be done in under 30 seconds.

Sources: West Sussex County Times and The Argus

The birds and the FDs

6 August 2012

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: Uncategorised

A story that’s been doing the rounds of local newspapers has made it to today’s Telegraph. Dear reader, what is it about this tale of alleged mundane office sexual shenanigans which elevates it to the status of juicy newsworthiness?

Skye Knight, 38, alleged that Billy Shannon, an embalmer, molested her after grabbing hold of her by her ponytail at Highfield Funeral Service, Huddersfield, West Yorks. She fled the cellar when Mr Shannon tripped on his apron, it was claimed.

Two weeks after the incident Mrs Knight was warned about her “flirtatious” behaviour, low-cut tops and short skirts.

The tribunal heard claims that Mrs Knight had embarked on an affair with Clive Pearson, of Marsden-based Pearson Funeral Service … the pair were seen in one of the company’s vehicles sent to collect a body from Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.

There’s more here. The case has been settled out of court.

Funeral for a friend

6 August 2012

Charles

No comments

Categories: Humanists

The following is by Matthew Parris in his Times column (£). A nice little snapshot of a typical modern British funeral.

I went on Friday to the funeral of my dear and (very) old friend Barbara Carrington, my landlady once. It was a humanist funeral: beautiful, simple, unsentimental, with the reader not sheepishly overstating, as vicars sometimes do, her acquaintance with the deceased, but instead reading a story of Barbara’s life, as recounted by family and friends. Barbara always said that I’d be late for my own funeral and I was nearly late for hers, overtaking, as I raced over Chesterfield Moor, a pale grey hearse. Hers? Surely not.

Not. The coffin was already there as I arrived in the nick of time. But as I left, still rushing to finish my Saturday column, that pale grey hearse drew up. Doubtless for the next funeral, but I had the momentary and illogical feeling that I had just broken the equivalent of the sound barrier, racing half an hour ahead of time itself, overtaking the deceased on the way to her own funeral.

View from the Westboro Baptist Church

6 August 2012

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: Uncategorised

Fred Phelps Jr offers his interpretation of the shootings at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Tweeted on August 5th at 6.40 pm.

Goodbye to you my trusted friend

6 August 2012

Charles

6 Comments

Categories: funeral music, music

Posted by Richard Rawlinson, our funeral music correspondent.

It’s 1974, there are three day weeks in Britain due to fuel shortages, and, across the Pond, President Richard Nixon is resigning over the Watergate scandal. And the radio soundtrack to these troubled times includes some of the cheesiest treatments of death in pop history: Gilbert O’Sulivan’s ‘Alone Again (Naturally)’ (above) and (below) Paper Lace’s ‘Billy, Don’t be a Hero’:

Then we come to the nadir of them all, Terry Jacks’ ‘Seasons in the Sun’. ‘We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun/But the hills that we climbed were just seasons out of time,” croons Jacks, as he appears to say goodbye in preparation for death by ‘too much wine and too much song’. I concur with the latter.

In fact, the maudlin hit has more credible, ‘Continental Cool’ roots, its original being Jacques Brel’s 1961 release, Le Moribund:

And amazingly, Kurt Cobain also recorded a cover of the Jacks version with Nirvana in the 1990s, which has added resonance as a suicide note from the junkie grunge star:

But if civil celebs out there ever get to play a rendition of ‘Seasons in Sun’ on the crem sound system, I do hope it’s this distinctly upbeat version by campy Cali-punk cover band, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. Somehow, it’s the most moving of the lot: