“If you’re dead, you’re dead, so who cares. I tell people illness is a nuisance and extreme illness is a f***ing nuisance, but you have to live with the cards you’ve been dealt. My family were put to death in the camps, so compared to that, what I’m going through is

  The composer Benjamin Britten’s last words to his sister, Barbara: “Sorry, old thing.”    

  The so-called traditional or Victorian funeral derives from a time when they did death differently, when people grieved differently. It was characterised by hush and awe, ostentatious gloom and social pretension. It was an invention of the Gothic Revival and claimed, spuriously, descent from the medieval guild funerals devised and