23 August 2012 – The Good Funeral Guide

What complaining through the Funeral Arbitration Scheme feels like

From: Beverley Webb
Sent: 15 August 2012 23:03
To: Weymouth Abbotsbury Rd (TCF)
Subject: Gloria Roper
Importance: High

Dear Ms Allen

We are writing to request you send us a copy of the estimate of costs of our late mother’s funeral and copies of the agreement we signed in your office in Weymouth on December 8th 2011, you can email these to the address’s provided below

michellelesleyblakesley@…

weebie71@…

Sincerely

Michelle Blakesley

Beverley Webb

From: funeral.clientrelations@letsco-operate.com
To: michellelesleyblakesley@...; weebie71@...
CC: info@nafd.org.uk
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:56:38 +0100
Subject: FW: Gloria Roper

Dear Mrs Blakesley

Thank you for your enquiry.

I have received a copy of your completed Conciliation Service Application Form from the Funeral Arbitration Scheme and have therefore re-opened your complaint. I will be reviewing our records and the previously agreed resolution to your concerns and have therefore requested all copies of documentation from our Weymouth Funeral Home. Once I am in receipt of the relevant documentation I will of course submit two copies together with the Funeral Directors Dispute Detail form that was attached to your application form, the Funeral Arbitration Scheme will provide you with a copy in due course.

May I respectfully request that any further correspondence in relation to your complaint is directed to the Funeral Arbitration Scheme at info@nafd.org.uk in the first instance or alternatively to funeral.clientrelations@letsco-operate.com for my attention.

Kind regards

Jon Potts

Client Relations Manager

Co-operative Funeralcare

From: Beverley Webb [mailto:weebie71@...]
Sent: 22 August 2012 10:04
To: Funeral Client Relations; info@nafd.org.uk; michellelesleyblakesley@...
Subject: RE: Gloria Roper – Att Jon Potts

Dear Mr Potts

Please can you explain why you have chosen not to disclosure paperwork we have requested directly from you and that we did not receive at the time of signing on December 8th 2011 at your Weymouth Co-operative Branch in Dorset with the manager Hellen Allen present following the sudden death of our mother.

Please can you further explain was it is necessary for the Funeral Arbitration Scheme to provide us with this in due course, We will look forward to a prompt reply

Sincerely

Michelle Blakesley & Beverley Webb

From: funeral.clientrelations@letsco-operate.com
To: weebie71@...
CC: info@nafd.org.uk; David.Collingwood@co-operative.coop
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:18:08 +0100
Subject: RE: Gloria Roper – Att Jon Potts

Dear Mrs Webb

Thank you for your email.

As I explained in my previous email, now that the matter has been passed to the Funeral Arbitration Scheme (FAS), I have requested all documentation from the funeral home. Once I have received this I will be in a position to complete the Funeral Directors Dispute Detail form that was attached to your application form and submit it together with duplicate copies of all our correspondence and documentation. This is usual practice.

I will ask FAS to forward a duplicate copy of the correspondence. This ensures that you have an exact duplicate of all documentation submitted to FAS by Funeralcare and that there are no discrepancies in the copy that you receive.

Kind regards

Jon Potts

Client Relations Manager

Co-operative Funeralcare

Editor’s note: personal email addresses have been obscured so that Beverley and Michelle do not receive ‘unsolicited’ correspondence. We will bring you updates as and when.

Sea la vie

From the Guardian, 1 July 2011:

For three soothing weeks in autumn, the endless roaring traffic on London’s Euston Road, one of the most choked and grime-polluted in the capital, will have competition: the sound of waves breaking and pebbles crunching, relayed live from Chesil beach in Dorset and wrapped in a sound sculpture around the Wellcome Collection building.

Ken Arnold, head of public programmes at the Wellcome, said: “Bill Fontana [who created the installation called White Sound] brilliantly confuses our sense of where we are and what we are experiencing. Just by closing our eyes he manages to turn one of Europe’s nosiest and most polluted roads into a live seascape. It will be fascinating to see how the public responds to the English Channel crashing on to the Euston Road outside the Wellcome Collection.”

Fontana is based in San Francisco, but has installed sound sculptures all over the world, including filling the Arc de Triomphe in Paris with the sound of waves crashing on the D-Day landing beaches on the Normandy coast.

He has already used Chesil beach in a piece for the Maritime Museum at Greenwich, south London, where visitors are surprised to encounter the sound of waves welling up from the grass as they walk along the path to the landlocked museum devoted to the history of the sea.

It’d make a nice backdrop for ‘silent reflection’ in funeral services — or for a committal, especially for a sea-lover. As Sue Gill said on this blog a fortnight or so ago:

A text that really resonates for me is from John F. Kennedy’s book The Sea which he wrote in 1962: ‘ I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea. I think it’s because we all came from the sea. It is an extremely interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean. And therefore we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean, and when we go back to the sea we are going back from whence we came.’