Introducing the solid wood cardboard coffin
Some fine copywriting here from CoffinWorld: This PRISCILLIAN Cardboard Casket is manufactured using ash wood. This casket’s excellent high shine design is available in brown. Apart from the double cover top that gives selections for witnessing, this casket is available in the colour of Brown. The handles are dipped in gold-like brass tint. An intensive […]
Modern death ‘reverberates like a handclap in an empty auditorium.’
There’s a good death piece over at the New York Times that you might like. It’s by Bess Lovejoy, author of the about-to-be-published Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses. Here are some taster extracts: Over the last century, as Europeans and North Americans began sequestering the dying and dead away from everyday life, […]
Thoughts of a funeral-goer
Peace, My Heart Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet. Let it not be a death but completeness. Let love melt into memory and pain into songs. Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest. Let the last touch of your hands be […]
ITV Exposure Responses FPL & NAFD
The following statement was read out after the Exposure programme 24.10.2012 ‘Last month in ‘The British Way of Death’ Exposure went under cover in the funeral industry at Funeral Partners Limited revealing racism and disrespect of bodies and the bereaved. FPL who own the branches in Slough and Tooting, where we’d been filming, have apologised, five people have been […]
Strange bedfellows?
The economic crisis in Greece has got so bad that football clubs are having to scour surviving businesses for sponsorship. Reuters reports that: Palaiopyrgos – many of whose players still attend school – have signed a deal with a funeral home. “For us it was a matter of survival,” manager Lefteris Vassiliou told Greek radio. Despite […]
Tattoo – A friend in death?
The Rise of the Maori Tribal Tattoo By Ngahuia Te Awekotuku University of Waikato, New Zealand Body adornment – swirling curves of black on shoulders, thighs, lower back, arms, upper feet, rear calves – has become an opportunity for storytelling as well. Some symbols represent children born, targets reached, places visited, and increasingly, memories of […]
Dunnarunna
Special communiqué from the Guvnor of the GFG, Sir Basil Batesville-Casket KBE, CDM, RLSS (Bronze) Blog Ed has up and hopped it to the coast for what he tells us is a well-deserved break. We’ll be the judge of that. There won’t be a job for him when he gets back. We need a better […]
Death is a thank you
From the New Zealand Herald: Greytown’s Mary Wait likes to be prepared for her adventures – death included. The 85-year-old has hand-painted her own coffin. Mary bought the coffin from a funeral director and painted it in 1994, although she was not expecting to die any time soon. “I think a funeral is a way of […]
No smoke without…
Hastings District Council has closed the chapel at the crematorium due to concerns over its earthquake strength. More here In Germany, a van carrying 12 coffins to a crematorium was stolen while the drivers enjoyed a comfort break. Here.
The kindness of strangers, UK vs US
Alexandra Frean is The Times’ bureau chief in Washington. She is British. When her husband died suddenly, one of my first thoughts was: “We’re all alone in a strange place.” But I was wrong. We were not alone. News of our plight spread around our neighbourhood within hours because the woman next door, unaware of […]
