Last week I passed an empty hearse going the other way. It set me musing. Freed from its solemn duties, no longer slowed by a weighty coffin and all the gravitas attendant upon such a thing, emptied of flowers and no longer the misty-eyed focus of profoundly sad people,

  Suffolk police have come under fire for their practice of awarding cash payments to officers who have to deal with exceptionally difficult or distressing incidents — a particularly horrible road crash, for example or, in the words of the Police and Crime Commissioner, “picking up charred remains of bodies

  Posted by Richard Rawlinson When Charles Darwin died in 1882, he was brought to Westminster Abbey the evening before his huge funeral. His coffin was borne through the cloisters, his five sons following, into a small, bare vaulted side chapel (St Faith), which had until recently been used as a