Blazing indignation

The infantile superficiality of the media’s treatment of issues around death and funerals is something we’ve deplored frequently on this blog — and today’s news is that things haven’t got any better.

Instead of giving serious consideration to what a crematorium might do with the heat it is compelled to capture from its waste gases, a necessary precondition for mercury scrubbing, the Daily Mail prefers to target its readers’ susceptibility to righteous indignation. So we get this: 

A council’s cost-saving plans to heat a chapel where mourners go to grieve with energy from the burning of dead bodies has outraged residents. 

‘I think it’s outrageous. Relatives will be sitting in the chapel remembering their loved ones and knowing their bodies are being used to cut energy bills,’ said James Sanderson, 43. ‘I would not like to be sitting there thinking my dead gran was heating up the room. It’s sick and an insult to our loved ones.’

What the clever journalist, who surely knows better, has hidden from the readers and the combustible Mr Sanderson, who seems to like going off on one if it means getting in the paper, is that human corpses make very poor fuel. This may be down to them being 72 per cent water. Try and heat your living room by chucking another nan on the fire and you’ll find that out soon enough.

Rentagob is never far from a hack’s mic or notebook at a time like this. In the same article Tory twat councillor Tom Wootton said:

‘The Conservative group is quite shocked by this proposal and we want more information and figures as to how cost-effective this would be.

‘The Liberals have insisted they will not burn rubbish to make energy but here they are proposing to use the heat from burning dead people, which I think is a little strange.”

Here in Redditch this debate has been had and put to bed. A union official raged and an undertaker spluttered, but the good ordinary people of this lovely old moss-covered market town simply thought about it quietly then gave their thumbs up to heating the swimming pool with a little help from the crem. 

For they understand that the heat given off by a burning body is negligible, and that their swimming pool will in fact be heated by the heat used to burn bodies. 

The British, it seems, are a reassuringly pragmatic people, an impression reinforced by the fact that, when we last looked, no one had bothered to comment on the Mail’s inflammatory nonsense.

Read the whole article, if you can be bothered, here.