Saving the people’s crem from the people’s undertaker
Things are at last hotting up in Burton upon Trent, where the local council and the borough council, joint owners of nearby Bretby crematorium, are considering a sell-out to Midlands Co-op for around £8 million. Local undertakers are rubbing their hands with glee. The Co-op is the most gleeful, of course. Other fans of the […]
Coffin price war on eBay?
Coffins have been coming up for sale on eBay from time to time for a few years, but not in a dependable flow. That may be about to change. Carl Marlow’s Coffin Company has a nice selection at keen prices and I guess he’s in there to stay. You can always tell which is a Carl […]
Roundup
The last ten days or so in tweets. I only tweet good stuff, remember — all the best death stories from around the world. These are all worth checking out. DIY suicide causes horrible death, claims EXIT. Time to legalise? http://bit.ly/ffDoI1 Online site in memo of Stephen Ross – http://bit.ly/hxUArO Contains this irresistible invite: Click here to contact […]
Sceptr’d loony bin?
Some invective from this week’s Spectator. It is by Florence King. Being English-American can be depressing. For years I thought about giving up my American citizenship and becoming a Brit to get my blood and my nationality lined up without the interference of a hyphen, but then something made me change my mind with a […]
There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so
I don’t know where you stand on literary criticism. I’ve never been a fan, largely because I don’t understand it. Many years ago I taught for a while, and I was charged with showing fifteen year-olds how to back-seat drive Shakespeare and other quite good writers. Despairing of my teaching methods, my students would resort […]
Shouldering responsibility
You will have your own feelings about a coffin being carried on shoulders of undertakers. It unsettles me. I don’t like to see those big men in black macs in such a close relationship with the body. It wouldn’t do for any of mine. I don’t want men I’ve never met carrying anyone of mine. […]
Music: consolation for life
If you didn’t catch the BBC Radio 4 programme Soul Music last week, you can still hear it on Listen Again. It’s worth it. Soul Music is a long-running series which just seems to get better and better. The format is simple: snippets of interviews with all sorts of people interwoven with the chosen piece […]
Who needs ’em?
In their new book, Final Rights (they gave me a sneak preview), Joshua Slocum, Executive Director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, and Lisa Carlson, Executive Director of the Funeral Ethics Organisation, will publish state by state tables demonstrating how many excess funeral directors there are in the US. They base their calculation on the head […]
Whose job is it anyway?
Prison Terminal
Prison Terminal is a moving cinema verité documentary that breaks through the walls of one of America’s oldest maximum security prisons to tell the story of the final months in the life of a terminally ill prisoner and the trained hospice volunteers—they themselves prisoners—who care for him. The film draws from footage shot over a […]
