17 April 2014 – The Good Funeral Guide

Dead loss

The Co-op’s stated aims

To be a commercially successful business
To meet the needs of our customers and the communities we serve*
To respond to our members and share our profits
To be an ethical leader
To be an exemplary employer
To inspire others through co-operation

Co-operative Group results 2013

Overall loss: £2.3 billion

Funeralcare sales for 2013 £370m – 3.4% up on 2012.

Underlying F’care operating profit increased 3.3% to £62.1m.

In 2013, F’care opened 16 new funeral homes, invested £3.1 million in crematoria development and £9.5 million in its fleet of vehicles.

In December, a new website was launched to allow http://laparkan.com/buy-tadalafil/ customers to purchase, as well as manage, a pre-paid funeral plan online.

More whitewash here.

“Those directors are now locked in a defensive mindset which makes intervention by the Bank of England and the Treasury all the more likely in the end. The walk-on part of Lord Myners is, I fear, no more than a sideshow in the slow procession towards the crematorium of this once great institution.”
Martin Vander Weyer in the Spectator.

*One in five people struggle to pay for a funeral

The gravestones are laughing

In Winwick Churchyard by Josh Ekroy

The gravestones are laughing. They tilt

at each other’s shoulders, droll tears of lichen
blotching their honourable faces. Seated in uneven
rows in their auditorium they note church-goers
squinch the gravel path to the embossed door.
Some lean backwards in mock amazement,
others forward, study the half-mown grass
or slap their thighs, whisper behind their hands —
only one stares in vertical — at man that is born
of woman, a joke they refuse to explain.
But the upright rectangle between the medlar
and the lych-gate, marbled in its twenty-first
century is excluded from the pleasantries,
is bullied after lights-out by the listing seniors,
its jar of wilting pansies the butt of scorn.
A much missed mum and nan? Don’t
make them lurch. Get real: become obscure.
An ancient resident is so amused he’s face down
on the turf and you can hear the subterranean
echo of guffaws, no sleep allowed in this dormitory.
Better have a witty answer when they taunt:
got any pubic moss yet? Wm. Blott, born
Oct 3rd,1756, died it’s not clear when, affects
a desire to know. So does his wife Mary
or is it Maura. Sissy Sally Evans, d. 2006,
has years to go before she stoops to see the joke.

Source