Deathfest Southbank
With a Festival Day Pass for Saturday 28 January or Sunday 29 January, muse upon mortality, tackle the taboo and join us for a weekend of discussion, workshops and talks. Ask questions, share your stories or simply be enlightened about the end. Including: – Assisted dying: The Human Rights Debate with Jon Snow – The Long […]
Ozzy Osbourne on coffin shopping
Ozzy Osborne is an agony uncle at the Sunday Times. Here’s a recent interaction: Dear Dr Ozzy, is it bad form to shop for your own coffin? (I ask this as a cancer patient with very particular tastes.) Anonymous Ozzy replies: It ain’t bad form, but there’s gotta be something better to do with your […]
Bicycle hearse for sale
Paul Sinclair, he who begat Motorcycle Funerals, has a bicycle hearse for sale. It’s made to his own design, and it’s been thoroughly tested. Says Paul, “We put a coffin on it and 30 stones of sandbags then rode it with two, me being pillion. It went fine.” Paul warns: “I won’t sell it to someone […]
Buried in greenery
When the GFG went to the London Funeral Exhibition last summer at Epping Woodland Burial Park we met Angie Whitaker, who works at a sister burial ground, Chiltern. Her husband is buried in the woods there. Angie gave a talk to visitors about her experience of natural burial. I asked her to write it up […]
How much are you?
A very big up to Saint and Forster Funeral Services, who have just gone public and transparent with their prices. From us, a big ask to all funeral directors to follow suit. Saint and Forster prices here. Saint and Forster here.
Absentee of the day
In death she left her body to science, thereby avoiding a funeral from which she would have wanted, her family knew from experience, to exclude so many enemies. From Janey Buchan’s obituary, here.
Hold up, hold on, stop crying your heart out
In a comment stream following a provocative post by someone or another, probably Richard, our religious correspondent, I suggested that because death generates chaotic feelings, many of which seek to vent themselves in disorderly behaviour, funerals ought to accommodate this. Our brilliant and erudite new commenter, Jenny Uzzell, reckons there’s no call for it. Well, […]
The hotrod hearse has arrived!
He’s one of life’s good guys, is David Hicks, whose brainchild the hotrod hearse is. Here’s his story: The Final Cruise Company was created when the life of a friend was cruelly taken on 29th May 2010. I had known Martin for a number of years, through my occupation working on Hotrods and he will be dearly […]
If only they knew
Funeral flowers skipped for landfill at Coychurch crematorium. Why don’t they compost them? Because they’re full of wire and oasis; it would take too long to deconstruct them. Which is why natural burial guru Ken West calls this ‘grieving waste’.
Quote of the day
“Britain, the only country in the world where at funerals the bereaved are congratulated on the degree to which they have so far supressed their emotions.” Source
