Charles – The Good Funeral Guide

HOSPICE FUNERALS CAN BE THE BEST, NO QUESTION

19 December 2017

Charles

4 Comments

Categories: Community funerals, Hospice Funerals

Hat’s off to Ann Lee, I say. She’s the courageous CEO of St Margaret’s Hospice, Taunton who has launched a joined-up funeral service with the twin goals of caring for her patients in death and earning some much-needed money to pay for the care her hospice extends to the living. What’s not to like?

A hospice is uniquely positioned to create great funerals at a time when too many mainstream funeral providers are offering a product which, in the eyes of consumers, costs too much and offers poor value. Yes there are some lovely undertakers out there doing their best for their clients. But they’re not putting in the thinking, most of them. They’re not creating funeral experiences that meet the needs of modern mourners.

Hospices can be the changemakers we need to break this dismal cycle. Because only they can close the care gap. The seamless service they talk about makes instant emotional sense, doesn’t it?

And they’ve got the two things they need to do it.

First: hospice values.

Second: hospice ways of working. A hospice workforce is a mix of highly-skilled professionals and highly-motivated volunteers. And it’s exactly this mix of people that will make hospice funerals beacons of best practice and low prices.

The blueprint is already out there — has been for some time, now. Communityfunerals.org.uk is a how-to guide to setting up a “funeral service which, in a spirit of common purpose, deploys volunteers and professionals as its members see fit in support of three objectives: commercial, social and environmental.”

The concept is the product of a partnership between the Good Funeral Guide and the Plunkett Foundation, the people behind community shops and pubs. It has attracted lots of interest but no-one has yet had what it takes to see it through. Now I sense its time has come.

Here are some excerpts from the communityfunerals manifesto:

A community funeral service (CFS) reclaims the care of the dead and the support of the bereaved from the for-profit sector, but in doing so it does not take inspiration from the past. A CFS is a progressive agent of social change in response to, in particular, the growing challenges posed by longevity, the changing needs of the bereaved and evolving trends in the expression of grief and the commemoration of the dead.

The community funerals movement does not denigrate the values and skills of the best funeral directors. On the contrary, it seeks to accommodate them.

A CFS promotes healthy, robust and informed attitudes to mortality by responding to the ‘death of one of us’ as ‘something that touches all of us’. In doing so it rejects as emotionally unhealthy the outsourcing of the care of the dead and the arrangement of their funerals to specialist undertakers.

A CFS asserts the normality of death and assumes ‘a neighbourly duty of care for our own’.

A CFS does not treat the death of someone as a standalone event. A CFS works collaboratively with those who care for the elderly and the dying, and with those who support the bereaved.

A CFS acknowledges that its fitness to deliver its social and environmental objectives derives from its ability to deliver economic benefits to it members. Unless it can provide a service offering better value for money than the for-profit sector it has no business in the marketplace.

And this is what the CFS manifesto has to say about how a CFS is staffed:

At the heart of the philosophy of a CFS is the belief that the bereaved would rather deal with ‘one of us’ than ‘one of them’ – that death is better handled by ordinary altruistic members of a community than by those whose exclusive professional competence is the care of the dead and the service of the bereaved. For this reason, a CFS is staffed as far as possible by people for whom the work is part-time, just as it was for the laying-out woman and midwife in times gone by.

There you have the gist of it. There’s much, much more on the communityfunerals website. Shining ideals and copperbottomed practicality. Here’s an aside: when did you last see anyone with physical or learning difficulties working in funeral service?

If you don’t mind, I want to speak direct to Ann now.

Ann, you’re clearly something of a newbie to the cut-throat world of commerce. Along with others, I think you could have taken better advice. Ours for preference. I don’t fall in with those angry folk who write Mr Hodgson off as a ‘bottle-blond muppet’ or a ‘poundshop Svengali’. But I do think his business plan lacks intelligence. No one ever made money by dishing up the same old same old.

A community funeral service, on the other hand, is tailor made for you.

So think again. Remember: i) hospice values, ii) pro-am workforce. A hospice funeral service will never make St Margaret’s a fortune but it’ll make people think well of your work and that will loosen the purse strings of your many supporters. Feed the love and you will reap a rich harvest.

If I’ve failed to persuade you and you insist on sticking exclusively to ‘income diversification’ as an end in itself, then your best bet is to open a string of kebab shops. More profitable.

You’re welcome.

The business case for a hospice funeral service

12 December 2017

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: Hospice, Hospice Funerals

To: The CEO of the North Devon Hospice

Dear Stephen Roberts

It is with sadness and grave misgivings that I have learned of your decision to throw in your lot with Hospice Funerals. Any new business is a gamble, but I think you’re risking more than money in this new venture. Let me tell you why.

You’ve done your market research and you know that the market you are entering is saturated: we have more funeral directors than we need. I recognise that you’d only be doing this if you had identified a gap — an opportunity to provide a commercial service catering for needs that are not presently being met. And you have. Together with Hospice Funerals you have identified four areas where you reckon you have a competitive advantage. One of these amounts to a USP which no other provider can match.

First, there is ‘transparency’ — price transparency. The Good Funeral Guide has been campaigning for undertakers to post prices online for years so I’m with you there. Failure to publicise prices stops the market from working properly and creates the impression that undertakers generally are overcharging. It is true that some undertakers have indeed been using this as a way of disguising unacceptably high prices, but many have refrained from doing so on the grounds that it was not, they felt, ‘dignified’ to do so. It has taken time to alter this mindset. Online price comparison sites have helped. The best undertakers now post their prices online while the rest are rapidly following suit. My judgement is that transparency, once a major issue for funeral consumers, won’t be for much longer.

Second, you intend your funeral service to be ‘affordable’ — in plain English, cheap. The reasons for funeral price inflation are complex and have much to do with above-inflation third-party price rises (eg, burial and cremation). The funeral directors’ component of the final bill for a funeral has actually been below the rate of inflation for the last two years. Margins generally have been shrinking in response to consumer demand for cheaper, simpler funerals. Furthermore, there has been an appreciable number of altruistic new entrants to the market throughout the UK operating on very low margins indeed in order to be accessible to people on low incomes. If you propose to operate your hospice funeral service at the ‘affordable’ end of the market you are likely to be disappointed by its crowdedness and its poor profitability. Partnering with an organisation — Hospice Funerals — that exists only to make money out of you is only going to diminish your bottom line further.

Third, your funeral business will be operating under the name of your hospice. This is likely to be a potent force in marketing your funerals. But remember, yours is essentially a speculative venture. Being good at looking after the dying, their families and friends, does not automatically translate into being good at looking after the dead and the bereaved. Any falling short in funeral provision is likely to impact grievously on the good name of your hospice and consequently on the high regard of your volunteers, supporters and donors. To lose money on this venture would be reputationally disastrous.

Fourth, your raison d’etre and USP is to bridge what you call the ‘care gap’ by providing a seamless service from terminal illness to grave. This is a marvellous idea. Yes, if you had cared for someone as they lay dying, why wouldn’t you want to go on caring for them in death? Why hand them over to strangers? A hospice is in a unique position to achieve this. It makes very good sense.

Except that it won’t be hospice staff who care for your dead on hospice premises, will it? It will be a separate team from somewhere else. Strangers, in other words. So not seamless at all. Or different. You’ll be just another undertaker, no different from all the rest, competing in the same overcrowded market.

You say that “North Devon Hospice’s key focus is income diversification right now”. Perhaps this gives us an insight into where you’ve gone wrong. Your thinking been profit-driven, not values-led. Consequently your business case is a muddle of wrong assumptions and wishful thinking.

I urge you to reconsider. Please, whatever you do, don’t take risks with your hospice’s good name.

With best wishes

Charles Cowling

Director and founder of the Good Funeral Guide

The riddle of the Sage

27 October 2017

Charles

4 Comments

Categories: Richard Sage

Fans and followers of the egregious Richard Sage aka Mark Kerby will be pleased to know that, since his release from prison, he has been living in straitened circumstances in Westcliff-on-Sea. In case you had forgotten, he was jailed for fraud. Only after he had been banged up did it become apparent that money handed over for prepaid funerals was missing.

He has now been summoned to answer 3 charges of fraud (details not known to us) at Basildon Crown Court in a hearing slated for 4-8 December 2017.

A little bit of adversity never dimmed the spirit of our exponent of worst practice in funeral service. The world may be against him but his dreams live on. Our spy on the spot, to whom we pay thanks, informs us that he has advanced plans to open up a funeral home in Westcliff. He is currently banned from holding any directorships. We think we have the name of the person under whose flag he will fly, together with the name and the address of the premises he will occupy, but we have been unable to verify these in a watertight way so we’ll keep mum for now.

As soon as we know more, we’ll let you know.

In addition to our own back catalogue on Mr Sage/Kerby, you may be interested in this.

Undertakers at war

13 December 2016

Charles

5 Comments

Categories: funeral directors

The necessity to collect and decently dispose of those who fell in battle never led to the conscription or recruitment of specialist undertakers. Undertakers wishing to serve their country in both world wars had to sign on as soldiers or sailors or airmen. There was no scope for serving as undertakers — with one exception.

Operation Mincemeat in 1943 was the exotic brainchild of British Intelligence. It was deployed to deceive the Germans into believing that a British invasion of Europe would be attempted in Greece and Sardinia, and that the force assembled in Casablanca apparently preparing to invade Sicily, the actual target, was merely a diversion. The purpose was to persuade the Axis forces not to send troops to reinforce the Sicily beaches.

To achieve this bluff, the corpse of a Welsh pauper, Glyndwr Michael, was clad in the uniform of a fictitious Royal Marines officer. Forged top secret letters were placed in his briefcase bearing the necessary misinformation. The corpse was released from a submarine off the coast of Spain and picked up by a fisherman. The documents were read by the Germans, who believed them. The Allies invaded Sicily in the face of muted opposition. You can read all about it on Wikipedia.

The complicated process of giving the corpse its identity-makeover and getting it good to go called for the services of undertaker. That undertaker was Ivor Leverton.

Ivor Leverton had been turned down for military service – medically unfit – but he was itching to do his bit. When the intelligence officers in charge of Mincemeat needed the body of poor Glyndwr Michael moved from St Pancras to Hackney, they turned to Ivor. The episode is described by Ben Macintyre:

“Soon after midnight, Leverton tiptoed downstairs from the flat above the funeral parlour in Eversholt Street, taking care not to wake his wife, and retrieved a hearse from the company garage in Crawley Mews … The dead man was wearing khaki military uniform but no shoes. Leverton was struck by his height. Leverton and Sons’ standard [removal] coffins measured six foot two inside, but [Leverton recorded in his diary] ‘the dead man must have stood six feet four inches tall’ and could not be made to lie flat. ‘By an adjustment to the knees and setting the very large feet at an angle, we were just able to manage’.”

Macintyre describes Ivor Leverton as “a man of unflappable temperament and a bone dry sense of humour”. His brother, Derrick, was cut from the same cloth.

Major Derrick Leverton, 12th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment of the Royal Artillery, was, by coincidence, among the first ashore on Sicily. An irrepressible optimist, he described the hellish sea crossing in a letter home as “a most excellent cruise”. His job was to set up a gun emplacement and engage enemy planes. As his men worked he brewed himself a cuppa. Then he was dive-bombed. One bomb fell in the sea “and splashed us with nice cool water”. In Macintyre’s narrative, “In case of further attacks the undertaker instructed his men to dig ‘little graves about three feet deep, which were very comfortable’ … And so, as the bombs fell around him, this heroic British undertaker sat in his own grave, wearing swimming trunks and a helmet, drinking a nice cup of tea. He looked ridiculous and, at the same time, bloody magnificent.”

Does anyone know of any other undertaker who had a good war?

Dignity in Blunderland

6 December 2016

Charles

40 Comments

Categories: funeral, funeral cost, funeral directors, funeral poverty, traditional funerals

Posted by Charles

A relatively new element of the Christmas experience is the themed winter wonderland. We’ve already had our first hilarious example of 2016 in Bakewell, Derbyshire. The Sun headline captured it neatly: WINTER BLUNDERLAND. Bakewell Winter Wonderland slammed by families as ‘pile of s***’ that is ‘so bad even Santa f***** it off’. The shocking muddy conditions saw the festive event likened to the Battle of the Somme.

Bit of a downer, obviously, but not enough to sully the good name of Christmas, a festival that remains robustly evergreen. Everyone complains how expensive it is. It has no utilitarian function. We do it the same way every year, ritualistically, so we know exactly what’s going to happen and what part we’re expected to play. Yes, it’s lovely to look at. But it celebrates an event – the birth of Christ – which to most people is of no relevance. Sure, there’s always a few bah-humbuggers who opt out, hunker down and have a no-Christmas Christmas instead, but vanishingly few, and their example is not influential. No, the overwhelming majority find the money and give it the full turkey. We love Christmas. Cheap at half the price.

If only we could say the same about the traditional funeral. It’s got most of the same ingredients as Christmas. Everyone says it costs too much. It has no utilitarian function. Its format never varies – it’s ritualistic. Everyone knows what’s going to happen and what part they are expected to play. It is undeniably eyecatching. It was once the vehicle for a Christian funeral, but to most people now that’s of no relevance. And yet, and yet, the number of people copping out and opting for a no-funeral funeral – direct disposal – is growing exponentially. People are increasingly unwilling to find the money for a trad sendoff. Why?

I mean, a ‘traditional’ funeral is a heritage cultural artefact. It can trace its origins to the heraldic funeral of the middle ages. In a country that loves its pomp and ceremony, this is the British way of death. Where did it all go wrong?

I’ll tell you. The undertakers, finding themselves caught in a spot of commercial bad weather, had a straightforward choice to make and they called it wrong. They slashed their margins and introduced cheaper alternatives to the the product we call the traditional funeral. Hardly a creative response, nor a plucky one.

Steady the Buffs. When people say that funerals are too expensive, is this what they really mean?

Listen hard and you’ll discern that what they really mean is that funerals aren’t worth what they cost. They offer poor value for money. That’s not the same as too expensive.

The problem is not with cost, it’s with value.

Last Thursday, Dignity bottled it and launched a direct cremation service under the branding of Simplicity Cremations. There’s a lot of the usual sales bilge on the website employing words like ‘dignified’ and ‘respectful’, as you’d yawnfully expect. There’s also a Ratneresque Cruise missile strike against the traditional funeral:

A full service funeral can be an expensive occasion that takes time and effort to arrange. You’ll often need a Funeral Director and a whole team of staff to co-ordinate the required services, vehicles and personnel, book the time with the crematorium, deal with paperwork, manage tributes and announcements and ensure everything runs smoothly on the day. And then there are also additional costs for items such as flowers, service cards, music, maybe a memorial or headstone and often a wake. It will usually take quite a few face-to-face meetings to arrange, not to mention several thousands of pounds.

In other words, yep, our flagship product is a bunch of crap. Too much time, too much effort, too much money. Don’t buy it.

Why would Dignity do that? These are clever people. Why diss the product that yields the best margin? This is industrial strength, Santa-killing insanity.

On the same day that Dignity was raising its cowardly white flag, Team GFG was, by happy coincidence, in London meeting a high-level ceremonialist with excellent connections and a strong belief that all is not lost. Because, dammit, we’re not giving up on the traditional funeral. We think the thing to do is to fix it – fix this issue around value.

What is a high-value funeral? It’s closely related to a high-value Christmas. It is something which does people a power of good. In the case of a funeral, it is transformative of grief.

For undertakers, ‘funeral flight’ represents an urgent existential threat. The business model of a funeral director is structured to provide all or most of the elements of a traditional funeral. Bankruptcy is hovering. When most funerals are private events or non-events, where will be the job satisfaction? For people grieving the death of someone, the consequences of the death of the funeral are quantified by John Birrell – here.

Christmas happens when we need it most. The days are short and dark, the weather awful. We all need cheering up. The retailers, whose livelihood depends on us splashing out bigtime, cleverly meet our needs with both the right merchandise and also cleverly pitched marketing messages – those supermarket tv ads are all about the feelgood factor. Retailers understand that they will only sell us stuff if they can show us the Christmas is going to be a richly meaningful experience.

When commercial interests align with consumer needs you’ve got the makings of a thriving market, one in which everyone does well. Our undertakers would do well to ponder this, and so would our celebrants. Funerals happen when we need them most, too. If the public, processional, ceremonial funeral is, as we believe, the best way to deliver a high-value funeral experience – a funeral worth every penny – how can it be updated and repurposed in such a way as to accomplish that?

Local SEO for funeral directors

4 November 2016

Charles

13 Comments

Categories: funeral directors

Posted by Mark Sharron

This is the fourth part in the “SEO for Funeral Directors” series. Previous posts can be found here:

Quick Introduction

I am the founder/director of Sussex SEO Ltd. I have been building websites for clients and optimising them to be found in Google and other search engines since 2006.

This post will focus on “local SEO” and should build nicely on my previous entries. It’s always a little difficult to know where to begin so I’ll start with a quick explanation of Google’s first page of results for and build on each concepts/techniques as the article progresses.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments section below.

What is meant by local SEO

Discounting PPC you have two opportunities to rank for any location based keyword e.g. Brighton Funerals / Brighton Funeral Director.

The local 3 pack, commonly referred to as Google maps.
The traditional 10 organic spots on the home page.

Both the local pack and organic results share a number of common ranking factors; however there are some unique differences required to secure a position in the coveted local pack.

Creating a local signal for your website can be distilled into three core areas:

Key Concepts

Google Maps/My Business
- Location of Your Business
- Google My Business/Google Plus
- NAP Consistency
Onsite SEO
- Business Name / Domain
- Entities vs Keywords
- Entity Relationships / Knowedge Graph / Entity Databases (less scary than its sounds)
- Understanding Semantic Search
- Maps
- Youtube Part 1
- Linking Out
- Structured Data (this one is a bit scary)
Offiste SEO
- Links
- Citations
- Youtube Part 2

Assuming I haven’t lost 90% of the GFG’s readers already, to get things started I’ll explain each of the key concepts, what they are and how they fit into the larger puzzle.

Google Maps / My Business:

Location of Your Business

The first thing to check is the physical location of your business. Google your keyword, in this case Funeral Directors + Location and look at where the map pins for where your competitors appear.

Google’s objective is to return local results. If your physical business address is located outside the area you will not be able to get a placement in the local pack. The same rule holds true if your business is on the perifphory of a locale. The further you are away from Google’s map centrum the harder it is to rank (not impossible, just harder).

Google My Business

Google My Business (formerly Google Plus, Google Local, Google Places) is the lynchpin that holds everything together.

A Google business listing is an online profile, it is free to sign up and requires you enter your business name, a link to your website, phone number, opening times, logo, images, email address and business classification.

The key is to fill out your profile 100%. Until recently it was possible to upload a description however ability has been rescinded giving increased weight to your business name, website URL and website copy.

Google will insist on verifying your business listing with a postcard. These usually take 1-2 weeks to arrive and will contain a PIN number that must be submitted before your listing will go live.

Ensuring your business listing / associated Google plus page are active / updated regularly, joining local / related communities and acquiring high scoring reviews are also essential ranking ingredients.

NAP Consistency

NAP is short for “Name, Address, Phone Number.” Google checks to ensure these details are aligned between your Google Plus page and your website. There are a few important factors to consider.

Ensure your NAP data matches Google Maps.

Correct: Brighton, The City of Brighton and Hove
Incorrect: Brighton, East Sussex

Place your NAP in your website’s footer.
Ensure your NAP data in your website matches your Google Business listing 100%.

Onsite SEO:

Business Name / Domain:

SEO is a labelling exercise. Its easier to rank if your business name / domain is a partial match or exact match. At the very least include “Funerals” or “Funeral Director” in your domain. It will make your life a LOT easier.

That’s the east stuff out of the way…

Entities vs Keywords

This next section will explore onsite SEO starting with the use of language on your website. To give you a quick grounding in local SEO it helps to understand the difference between an entity and a keyword.

A keyword is something a user types into the search engine to find something. E.g. Brighton Funeral Director or Sussex Funeral Director

An entity is person, a place an object or a thing.

For example:

Brighton (entity) a place
Sussex (entity) a place
Funeral (entity) a thing/ceremony
Funeral director (entity) a thing/profession

Entities are usually associated/related to other entities. If we review the “onsite SEO” article I posted last year, you can create a ranking signal using placement of keyword throughout your website.

Avoid Over Optimisation

Placement of too many of the same keyword within page content (more than 4% density) may result into Google penalising your site for over optimisation.

One of the work arounds is use of related language within the text on your site e.g. coffin, death, cremation, burial to build relevance around the funerary theme.

This technique can be used to boost your website’s “local” relevance by understanding which entities are associated with your “business area” and working these into the fabric of your website.

The easiest way to examine these is via Google’s knowledge graph. I’ll use Brighton as the example. Click to make it bigger.

The important points to pick up on are the entities (locations) that fall within the greater Brighton area, these include Portslade, Falmer, Peacehaven. If you zoom in on the map you will also find Rottingdean, Whitehawk, Hove, Saltdean, Roedean and a lot more.

In addition, you will notice points of interest located within Brighton and Hove (these are also entities).

Drill down deeper and you will find references to people (check Wikipedia).

Semantic Search

It is these associations of entities and related language that forms the basis of semantic search which is an un-necessarily complicated way of explaining that the search engine is able to understand that concepts are related to one another other. To cite the above example if I reference “Rottingdean, Whitehawk and Fatboy Slim” the search engine will understand I’m talking about Brighton and Hove.

Local Signals:

To further boost the relevance of your site you can add “local signals.” Placement of related entities within the text goes a long way but there’s more to it.

Google Maps:

Add an embedded Google map with your business listing and add a link back to your Google maps/business listing.

YouTube:

Commission a video with a “local” focus (more on this later). Embed it on your website.

Embed Reviews:

Embed reviews from Google into your site. This can be done with Google’s API. You’ll need to ask your web developer to do this.

Link Out:

Reference points of interest / official local government offices (entities) within you text and link to them (make sure Google links to them from its knowledge graph).

Structured Data:

Structured data is a means of adding an invisible layer of code to a website to a enhance ranking signal or control how a website is displayed within Google’s index.

There are multiple forms of structured data, the one most commonly used is referenced at http://schema.org/.

The idea behind structured data is to allow a web master to clarify content to the search engine by marking it up with schema.

https://schema.org/LocalBusiness provides a number of actionable examples e.g.
Without Schema:

<h1>Sussex Funerals Ltd</h1>
Independent Brighton funeral directors for caring, compassion & choice. Providing excellent 24 hour personal service.
185 Portland Road
Hove, The City of Brighton and Hove
Phone: 01273 736469

With Schema:

<div itemscope itemtype=“http://schema.org/LocalBusiness”>
<h1><span itemprop=“name”> Sussex Funerals Ltd</span></h1>
<span itemprop=“description Independent Brighton funeral directors for caring, compassion & choice. Providing excellent 24 hour personal service.</span>
<div itemprop=“address” itemscope itemtype=“http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
<span itemprop=“streetAddress”>185 Portland Road</span>
<span itemprop=“addressLocality”> Hove</span>,
<span itemprop=“addressRegion”> The City of Brighton and Hove</span></div>
Phone: <span itemprop=“telephone”>01273 736469</span></div>

This is just scratching the surface with schema. You can mark up almost every entity imaginable and create associations using the “sameAs” attribute. Of all the steps I have listed so far this is without a doubt the least accessible to most and I would recommend speaking with your web developer a preferred digital marketing professional to help implement this step.

Offsite SEO:

Links

Link building is an important part of any SEO campaign; in fact, it is essential to ranking well on

Google other search engines. Google places a heavy emphasis on quality and quantity of inbound links as a measurement of how authoritative/trusted a site is for its subject matter.

Counting how many 3^rd party websites to your website is a means for Google to the reputation/trust/authority if your website.

The more competitive a key phrase being targeted; the more links will be needed to achieve a desired search engine rank for a given keyword.

Relevant links will rank your site. Irrelevant links will either be less effective or cause Google to perceive your site as being less relevant. To give you some examples:

Funeral focused site e.g. this one = relevant(good link).
Brighton / Sussex focused site = relevant to area (good).
Site about Death = indirectly relevant (still good).
Site about piano’s = irrelevant (bad)

As mentioned above, links are essential to ranking your website.

Citations

A citation is an implied link and affects your websites prominence in Google’s local pack.

A citation is simply your business name, address and phone number (NAP) placed on a 3^rd party site such as a business directory. The trick is to ensure the NAP matches that placed on your Google Business profile and website.

In addition is important to ensure data such as business opening times are aligned.

YouTube:

Google owns YouTube. It therefore comes as no surprised that Youtube video’s can help influence local SEO prominence. Creating a video which references your business details and focuses on one of your primary keywords creates a relevant link, citation and rich media which once embedded into a web page will drive your site’s exposure. This article provides a comprehensive guide.

Conclusion:

Configuring a website to be found within Google for a desirable keyword (SEO) is at its heart an exercise of two halves:

A labelling exercise (keyword research: understanding what users search for and labelling your content accordingly)
Matching and exceeding your competition (quality / quantity of relevant content & links)

Any questions ???

Richard Sage / Mark Kerby release date

30 August 2016

Charles

27 Comments

Categories: Richard Sage

Reports have reached us that the infamous fraudster Richard Sage also known as Mark Kerby is due for release on 12 January 2017. His stated intention, we learn, is to return to the Southend-on-Sea area. We have not been able to verify these reports, but our source is trusted. If you don’t know who Richard Sage is, click his name in Categories below.

Continuing bonds

24 June 2016

Charles

No comments

Categories: memorialisation, Memorialising

From the ever-excellent Kenny Farquharson’s latest column in The Times:

There were just two drinkers at the bar when I walked in. Once they had established I was not from “the social” they were warm and engaging.

One stood nursing a whisky under a sign that said “Nicky’s Corner”. Would you happen to be Nicky, I asked him.

“No, no, no,” he said. “Nicky’s dead. Four years now. That’s him there.” He pointed to a sun-bleached photograph pinned to the wall. The photograph was in a plastic sleeve, along with some white stuff I couldn’t immediately identify.

What’s that white stuff, I asked.

Seagull feathers, he said.

The barmaid explained. The Creel being next to the docks, it was always surrounded by seagulls. Often, when the door opened, a single seagull feather would blow in and float around the bar a little while before finally coming to rest.

“The boss says that’s Nicky coming in to see how we’re doing. So we’ve always got to pick up the feather and put it in there,” she said, nodding toward the plastic sleeve.

A seagull feather floating in a shaft of sunlight and stoor*. Nicky, still a regular. A soft-hearted story in a hard man’s bar. Magic realism in the Blue Toon**.

*Dust **Peterhead

The modern funeral is a grief-bypass procedure?

20 May 2016

Charles

14 Comments

Categories: Formality vs informality, funeral, funeral music, funeral poetry, Religious funerals

Stewart Dakers is a 76 year-old voluntary community worker with a weekly column in the Guardian. He wrote a piece in last week’s Spectator about funerals. Here’s a taster:

Funerals ain’t what they used to be. Today’s emphasis is more on celebrating a life past than honouring the future of a soul. While I am not averse to a celebratory element, the funeral is morphing into a spiritually weightless bless-fest. This was brought home to me last week at the funeral of Enid, a lady I knew only through our mutual attendance at bingo in the community centre.

I was uncomfortable from the moment we gathered outside the church, where my sombre suit set me apart from the Technicolor crowd of family and friends. The atmosphere was more akin to a wedding, even a hen do, than a funeral, the air drenched in perfume and aftershave. Inside, there was pew-to-pew chatter, wall-to-wall music (Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’, inevitably), not a single moment of silence, and not a single sacred song, let alone a prayer (an inaccurately mumbled Lord’s Prayer excepted). There were two readings, one by a grand-niece of perhaps eight, snivelling, bless, a poem about being only next door; then a nephew offering a eulogy, the main point of which was that his aunt had been a keen gardener ‘and she will plant her flowers in heaven’.

I know I shouldn’t sneer. Religion, the Anglican version anyhow, is a broad church with a wide liturgical spectrum. But I could not help feeling that such celebration missed the point. It somehow connected with a virtual life rather than a real death. It was spiritual displacement activity.

You can read the rest of the article by clicking here.

Introducing the Pebblewood Urn

15 May 2016

Charles

6 Comments

Categories: ashes, coffins

Davina Kemble’s pebblewood coffin was unveiled at the Ideal Death Show 2013. Reviews were mixed. Some undertakers thought it would be impossible to persuade a dead person to conform to its rounded shape; others reckoned there was no problem. Since then, Davina’s partnership with her manufacturer reached a conclusion, but she’s carried on working away at it and a full-size pebble-shaped coffin will soon be on the market.

In the meantime, she has just launched her pebble-shaped ashes urn. It is taking off nicely. She is selling direct to the public through Etsy – here – and of course she’d be pleased to hear from discerning undertakers. Davina’s website is here and her Facebook page here.

Hats off to Davina. She’s stuck the course – she’s done what she’s had to do and seen it through without exemption, etc. There have been forbidding lows that would have done for most of us.

Here at the GFG-Batesville Shard the consensus is that Davina’s pebble urns are rare and lovely. We hope you like them, too.