Branding
Posted by John Porter Strangeways prison, Manchester 1982, pre riot. I was a student on placement and during my first week asked an officer what the red and white cards meant outside each cell. “White means CofE and red is for ‘left-footers’ – Catholic.” Nothing for Jewish, Muslim, Sikh or any other religious flavour! I saw “HIV” on […]
Et in Arcadia ego
Posted by Richard Rawlinson I first came across this Latin phrase as a teenager reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Narrator Charles Ryder finds the words inscribed on a skull displayed in his bedroom. ‘Even in Arcadia, there I am,’ is the translation. Death, the great equaliser, prevails even in the most utopian lands, as certain in […]
Free until the point of death
Click the letter and you’ll make it bigger and readable. It’s from Angie Gunn, Mortuary Services Admin Co-ordinator at Stockport NHS Trust. It’s been sent to all local undertakers. “From 1 Oct, once all paperwork regarding the release of a body has been received, you will be contacted by a member of the Mortuary […]
It’s what they would have wanted
The woman who had died was young, her end sudden and tragic. She had fallen from a yacht and drowned. The funeral was big, loud and emotional. In the days following, many came on their own to lay flowers quietly on her grave. One weekday lunchtime a man was depositing a cellophane-wrapped bunch when he […]
Going out in credit
It is a long established principle of English law that there is no property in a corpse. As church lawyers in the middle ages used to say in that scholarly way of theirs (with a solemn nudge and a wink), a dead person – a cadaver – is cara data vermibus: flesh given to worms. It […]
Last poem
Japanese Maple by Clive James (who is dying) Your death, near now, is of an easy sort. So slow a fading out brings no real pain. Breath growing short Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain Of energy, but thought and sight remain: Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see So much sweet beauty […]
What would Doctor Who’s funeral be like?
Posted by Melissa Stewart How does the Doctor’s experience of intergalactic death care compare with our earthly experiences? What would he think of arrangements in an average high street chain? In the 1985 episode ‘Revelation of the Daleks’, loosely based on Evelyn Waugh’s ‘The Loved One’, we learn a little about the Doctor’s attitude to […]
Yer gotta hav it!
Guest post by John Porter Anyone who says to me “You have to”, I nearly always reply with “why?” and then “why?” again! The fact is I don’t have to do anything. I can choose whether to or not – that’s different. “Not so,” I hear some say, “you have to have car insurance – […]
Packed to the rafters
One night in the early 1700s, Henry Trigg was making his way home when he heard a disturbance in the churchyard. Looking closer, he saw, to his horror of course, grave-robbers making off with a freshly-buried corpse. He continued on his way, resolving never to let the same thing happen to him. (He isn’t reported to have tried […]
14 years ago today
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Do you remember what you were doing on 9/11/2001? I was visiting the offices of BSkyB in London, discussing media issues in a meeting room that had a TV screen on a wall showing Sky News with the volume down. Our conversation came to an abrupt halt as we became aware of […]
