High profile life, low key death
Posted by Richard Rawlinson I know, I know, 120 years is not a significant anniversary like a centenary, but can we spare a thought for Cole Porter, born in 1891? Two of the great American composer’s many classics, I’ve Got You Under My Skin and Just One Of Those Things, are popular secular choices at […]
Frightfully common
The English interior designer David Hicks created the signature look of the Swinging Sixties. Those strong colours and geometrical designs — they’re his. He seems to have been a man at ease with his mortality, a mindset informed, perhaps, by his daily ritual of chain-smoking cigarettes. At his flat in Albany he “created a crimson […]
Undercutting the undertakers
Business in bargain basement funerals is booming in Germany. Budget undertakers now enjoy 25 per cent of the market, up from 16 per cent two years ago. A typical German funeral is comparable in cost to a British funeral: somewhere between £2,500 and £3,000. But the funeral price comparison website Bestattungen.de will quickly lead you […]
Final solution
It is only eight o’clock pm here at GFG HQ, yet it’s already some 15 minutes since we sounded the hooter and nudged our horny-handed workforce into the weary, black, wet November night. We like to feel that we are kindly, enlightened employers, for whom wellbeing issues come first. At the desk of one of […]
Please help!
Judith Simpson is a PhD student in the School of Design at the University of Leeds. She is researching the way in which the dead body is dressed, ‘styled’ and presented and how (or even if) this relates to what people believe about life and death. Here is Judith’s appeal to YOU: I am asking […]
Eric Idle’s eulogy to George Harrison
Eric Idle’s eulogy to George Harrison at the memorial event at the Hollywood Bowl: When they told me they were going to induct my friend George Harrison into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame posthumously: my first thought was – I bet he won’t show up. Because, unlike some others one might mention – but […]
Online amnesia
ObituariesToday.com is national obituary service, with funeral home listings, pre-planning information, a resource section for funeral information, as well as obituaries and memorial announcements. In other words it’s one of those online memorial websites. There are lots and lots of them. If you want to find the page on ObituariesToday which commemorates, shall we say, […]
Fiction tempers the funeral facts
By our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson TV mini-series The Borgias stars Jeremy Irons as Renaissance Pope Alexander VI, nee Roderigo Borgia. Created by Neil Jordan of The Tudors fame, is a lavish period piece (winning this year’s Emmy for Best Costume) and is packed with racy plotlines involving power struggles, sex, assassinations and sibling rivalries. […]
