View from the Westboro Baptist Church
Fred Phelps Jr offers his interpretation of the shootings at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Tweeted on August 5th at 6.40 pm.
Goodbye to you my trusted friend
Posted by Richard Rawlinson, our funeral music correspondent. It’s 1974, there are three day weeks in Britain due to fuel shortages, and, across the Pond, President Richard Nixon is resigning over the Watergate scandal. And the radio soundtrack to these troubled times includes some of the cheesiest treatments of death in pop history: Gilbert O’Sulivan’s ‘Alone Again (Naturally)’ […]
I hated my brother. When he died, all I felt was happiness…
Liz Hodgkinson writing in The Daily Mail 31 July 2012 The news came as a shock, yes, but it didn’t provoke tears, or even any sense of grief. I’d just heard from my niece that my brother Richard had died of a heart attack, aged 62, following an apparently minor operation. And all I felt […]
A brief history of undertakers
By Richard Rawlinson In medieval times, the word ‘undertaker’ was used vaguely for anyone undertaking a task, whether house building or funeral work. It doesn’t derive from taking the deceased six feet under but, by the 17th century, the term ‘funeral undertaker’ was being abbreviated to ‘undertaker’ and, as this association became widespread, folk in other […]
Kicking the bucket in Swaziland
The Times of Swaziland is in a lather about deceaseds, feckless young men and undertakers. Terrific stuff, this. They could care less how they lead their sorry lives. All they want is to get a great send-off when they ultimately kick the proverbial bucket. It’s so discouraging. Funeral undertakers are having the time of their lives, […]
Thoughts of a funeral-goer
I’m back. From the brink of death. And Lyme Regis. It sounds dramatic but I really did think I was a goner. And Charles tells me that so too did many readers of this blog. He had several emails asking him not to kill me off. I’d like to reassure those people that Charles doesn’t […]
Love, death and much, much verse
The Purbeck Isle What do love and death have in common? Ans: they inspire poetry. It’s where we turn when words fail. Two pieces today. The first is freshly minted by our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson. We do not know We do not know when or how we shall die. Will we even have time to […]
New Orleans comes to London
Posted by Vale Celebrant Kim Farley went to Abram Wilson’s memorial service a week or so ago. He was a young American Jazz Musician who died unexpectedly aged just 38. She writes: ‘There was a procession from the South Bank to St John’s in Waterloo and once inside the relative cool of the packed church, […]
Faithful grudgebearer
From the Times of India: A bull bided its time and gored an old man to death when an opportunity came a day after the latter had thrown hot water on it. The bull followed the man when he was being taken to a hospital and later reached the crematorium during his funeral in little-known […]
Dog Day
Dignity Plc said its profit for the first half rose about 11 percent on strong performance in its funeral services and crematoria businesses. The company said its underlying pretax profit rose to 27.5 million pounds ($43.16 million) for the 26 weeks ending June 29 from 24.7 million pounds a year earlier. Dignity, which operates a […]
