No death, please, we’re British
Here’s one of those nimby stories that cause funeral directors such headaches. The setting is suburban Horsham, Sussex. A mother who recently cured her phobia of coffins has shared her fears about the establishment of a funeral directors near her home. Katie Lee, 37, said she was ‘gob smacked’ by ‘inconsiderate’ signs ‘suddenly’ erected on the […]
The birds and the FDs
A story that’s been doing the rounds of local newspapers has made it to today’s Telegraph. Dear reader, what is it about this tale of alleged mundane office sexual shenanigans which elevates it to the status of juicy newsworthiness? Skye Knight, 38, alleged that Billy Shannon, an embalmer, molested her after grabbing hold of her […]
Funeral for a friend
The following is by Matthew Parris in his Times column (£). A nice little snapshot of a typical modern British funeral. I went on Friday to the funeral of my dear and (very) old friend Barbara Carrington, my landlady once. It was a humanist funeral: beautiful, simple, unsentimental, with the reader not sheepishly overstating, as […]
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 […]
