Free, easy, devastating
Posted by Charles Funeral shoppers are nervous shoppers. They are in unknown territory, they’ve got nothing to go by. Of all shoppers, funeral shoppers are the most likely, if they catch a glint or a whiff of anything negative about a funeral director, to rear up, eyes rolling, and gallop away as fast as they […]
Absence makes the art grow fonder
Are you a graveyard rabbit? Are you a photographer? If your answer to both of the above is yes, you can enrich yourself to the tune of £1,000 by indulging your two favourite fads and entering MAB’s Dead Art? Then and Now competition, details of which follow: Last year was the second success of the Memorial […]
New coffin 2 — the Burial Cloud
From the press release: Linda Robinson is a professional end-of-life carer and her clients, tucked up in warm, cozy beds, often confided to a dread of being carried out in a wooden box. When her children were young, the family wrapped dead pets in soft woollen jumpers for burial, and inspired by this, Linda decided […]
New coffin 1 — the Curve
Behold the Curve coffin developed in Tenterden, Kent, by Andy Clarke. Andy says, “I always knew that there was room for a different type of coffin. I couldn’t understand why there was so little choice for what is, at the end of the day, an essential item in all of our lives. “My desire was […]
This morning I stood at my grave…
Posted by Charles Philip Gould, one of the architects and strategists of New Labour, died of cancer at the end of last year. Before he died he bought himself a grave at Highgate cemetery. Below is an extract from his final book, which he finished dictating hours before his death. When I was recovering from […]
Moon shot
Bill Curbishley, manager of totemic Who drummer Keith Moon, has received an invitation from the London Olympics committee. They want Moon to play at the closing ceremony. Curbishley said: “I emailed back saying Keith now resides in Golders Green crematorium, having lived up to the Who’s anthemic line ‘I hope I die before I get old’. If […]
Cremator says whoomph
Germany is a world leader in crematorium technology, but its crematoria are finding it hard to cope with some of its XXL citizens: The crematorium employee in the western German town of Hamelin took a last look at the coffin before pushing it inside the furnace. This was the third coffin he had processed on […]
Shark eats shark as LM Funerals are gobbled up for £37.5 million
Posted by Charles Marvellous news from last Wednesday’s Telegraph: The Duke Street consortium, which includes Babson Capital Europe and Metric Capital Partners, has acquired LM Funerals from Sovereign Capital, a buy-out firm focused on investing in small companies. LM Funerals is the third largest funeral company in Britain, with more than 60 branches – mainly in […]
Modern grief 2 — To shirk suffering is also to shirk those who suffer
Posted by Charles Over at the Heart of Mopsus blog, here, the Rector of Swanvale Halt took part in an Easter Friday Walk of Witness and reflected as follows: Christians insist on publicly remembering a single, immensely violent event on a sunny Bank Holiday when everyone else is enjoying themselves; certainly most of my friends, […]
Modern grief 1 — Why teddy bears?
Posted by Charles In a decorous piece of invective in last Friday’s Daily Telegraph, Damian Thompson analyses the way people express grief today, and why: A few weeks after the murders of the schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002, I stood in Soham parish church with the vicar, the Rev Tim Alban Jones. […]
