Lord Avebury, the Liberal Democrat peer who died on Valentine’s day was noted for the eccentricity of some of his views. He was a conventional supporter of assisted suicide but his expressed preferences for his disposal raised eyebrows.
He was the only person to have his body rejected by Battersea Dogs Home. A keen environmentalist, he was determined to keep his deathprint to a minimum so he offered his corpse to be eaten by strays. The Sun calculated that he’d fill 168 1lb tins of dogfood. Battersea turned him down. They said his ageing corpse wouldn’t be sufficiently nourishing.
His last request concerning his disposal was that he might be buried without a coffin, thus enabling his remains to return to the earth as rapidly as possible and push up a tree.
You know what happened next? Yes, he was told that this is illegal.