I Will Be Blessed — Ben Howard

Oh my ghost came by
Said who do you love the most
Who you wanna call before you dieOh my ghost came by here
Said who do you love the most
Who you gonna sing to ‘fore you’re goneOh hey heaven is the place we know
Heaven is the arms that hold us
Long before we go
Oh hey, heaven is the place we know
Heaven is the arms that hold us
Long before we goOh my ghost came by here
Said who do you love the most
Who you gonna sing to ‘fore you go

Oh hey heaven is the place we know
Heaven is the arms that hold us
Long before we go
Oh hey, heaven is the place we know
Heaven is the arms that hold us
Long before we go

Oh if you’re there
When the world comes to gather me in
Oh if you’re there
I will be blessed
Oh if you’re there
When the world comes to gather me in
Oh if you’re there
I will be blessed
Oh if you’re there
When the world comes to gather me in
I hear you’re there
I will be blessed
I will be blessed

Oh if you’re there
When the world comes to gather me in
Oh if you’re there
I will be blessed
I will be blessed

A big thank you to Georgina Pugh for sending us this.

Unwanted man

Sage

 

There’s a leaflet circulating in Southend-on-Sea and environs advising the populace to have nothing to do with the Mary Mayer Funeral Home.

What, you ask, has Ms Mary Mayer done to deserve this? She would seem to be both blameless and admirable — an idealist, even:  

Our founder Mary Mayer, a nurse of long standing, felt that the funeral service profession had become an impersonal big business; large groups had formed buying up the traditional family funeral directors known for their personal care and trust by generations of families and turning them into large, money making giants concerned on profits and not families.

Go Mary!

We found this short biog at Duedil:

Mary Mayer is British and was born in 1954. Her first directorship was in 2012 with Mayer Funeral Home Ltd – she was 57 years old at the time. Mayer Funeral Home Ltd is her most recent non-secretarial directorship where she holds the position of “Nurse”. The company was established 2012.

Well, it seems that no one has ever seen Mary. What they have seen instead is the not inconsiderable bulk of a scamp called Richard Sage, a man who, an investigative journalist once observed to us, “would rather make a bent 99p than an honest pound.” The blog has covered some of Richard’s mischiefmaking here

When he did a runner from Burnley we put the Dispatches TV people onto his trail. They set an ex-News of the World hound to track him down but the old bugger had vanished. It’s a trick he’s picked up. 

We heard he’d resurfaced under this Mayer moniker shortly after he opened his doors, promising that this time he really had learned his lesson. He even gave himself a new name: Mark Kerbey. We set the ITV undercover people onto him, warning them that if he got a whiff of who they really were he’d be off into the ether like that. They rocked up at Ms Mayer’s establishment with hidden cameras and air of innocence — but Richard had whiffed them. They came empty away. 

We’d reckoned that exposure on prime time TV would be the most effective way of getting rid of him once and for all — more effective than writing about him on this blog. It was not to be. So we rang the local paper and urged them to get onto the story in the public interest. We chatted to influential people in the area and agreed to keep quiet for the time being while steps were taken. 

Well, the cat’s out of the bag now. Whoever is putting that leaflet about is doing good work. 

Postscript: Ben Anderson, the man behind the ITV exposé of malpractice at Gillman’s, is on Panorama on Thursday reporting from Helmand. 

 

 

The Dabbler

Extract from the blurb for The Fixer, BBC2, Tuesday 26 Feb, 8pm-9pm: 

David Holmes runs a family business that’s one of the few industries to buck the current economic trend. Yet Holmes and Sons in Fleet, Hampshire, is almost dead and buried. If you haven’t guessed, they’re funeral directors. David’s young sons Olly and Toby are bored to death; David’s a soft touch (his nickname is Giveaway Dave), while colleague Sheena is sulkily and stubbornly resistant to change.

We give you advance notice of this with a heavy heart. The GFG gave hours of unpaid advice to the makers of the programme. We parted company when they rejected that advice and went trotting gaily down the well-worn path of formulaic tellytosh. The next sentence of the blurb tells you precisely why: 

The meeting with a wedding planner to get ideas how to organise an event is nearly the final nail in the coffin for [Sheena].

As it was for us. We had gone out of our way to explain that a funeral business is like no other; that generic solutions don’t apply; that a cosmetic makeover wouldn’t do the trick; you can’t turn a funeral into a good funeral by accessorising it with gewgaws. 

What we should have done next was withdraw permission for any footage of us to be shown. We didn’t — because we didn’t think it would be used. That was a very grave mistake and it calls for an apology. We had agreed a before-and-after format whereby we identified a problem… and then returned to rejoice in how wonderfully well it had been rectified. We got as far as filming the ‘before’ stuff and, regrettably, it looks as if it may be shown alone, wholly unbalanced by the praise and congratulation we looked forward to heaping on David and his crew at the end. 

Sorry Toby, sorry Olly. Our intention was good. 

The Good Funeral Guide
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