Final solution
It is only eight o’clock pm here at GFG HQ, yet it’s already some 15 minutes since we sounded the hooter and nudged our horny-handed workforce into the weary, black, wet November night. We like to feel that we are kindly, enlightened employers, for whom wellbeing issues come first. At the desk of one of […]
Please help!
Judith Simpson is a PhD student in the School of Design at the University of Leeds. She is researching the way in which the dead body is dressed, ‘styled’ and presented and how (or even if) this relates to what people believe about life and death. Here is Judith’s appeal to YOU: I am asking […]
Eric Idle’s eulogy to George Harrison
Eric Idle’s eulogy to George Harrison at the memorial event at the Hollywood Bowl: When they told me they were going to induct my friend George Harrison into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame posthumously: my first thought was – I bet he won’t show up. Because, unlike some others one might mention – but […]
Online amnesia
ObituariesToday.com is national obituary service, with funeral home listings, pre-planning information, a resource section for funeral information, as well as obituaries and memorial announcements. In other words it’s one of those online memorial websites. There are lots and lots of them. If you want to find the page on ObituariesToday which commemorates, shall we say, […]
Fiction tempers the funeral facts
By our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson TV mini-series The Borgias stars Jeremy Irons as Renaissance Pope Alexander VI, nee Roderigo Borgia. Created by Neil Jordan of The Tudors fame, is a lavish period piece (winning this year’s Emmy for Best Costume) and is packed with racy plotlines involving power struggles, sex, assassinations and sibling rivalries. […]
There’s nowt so gold as green
Posted by Charles An irony of the natural burial movement is that it was begat by idealists and freethinkers and environmentalists… and then spied and pounced on by venture vultures scenting carrion. When you do the math you can easily see why — and begin to fear that there are going to be tears before […]
Buried this day
Joan Wytte was born in 1775 in Bodmin, Cornwall. She was sometimes called the “Fighting Fairy Woman” or the “Wytte (White) Witch”. Joan was famed as a clairvoyant, and people would seek her services as a seer, diviner and healer. Her healing practices included the use of “clooties” (or “clouties”), strips of cloth taken from a sick […]
This ae nighte
Halloween has deep roots. Through All Hallows Eve to the old pagan night of Samhain, each marks the time of year when the veil between this world and the next are at their thinnest and the dead and the living can most easily meet and mingle. As this blog’s contribution to the celebrations, here is […]
Funnybones
Posted by Vale What is it with this fascination with bones and skeletons? Faced with a pile of them and one man plasters into the walls and cornices, another creates chandeliers and shields while elsewhere anonymous skulls are given names, cleaned, polished and even appealed to for information. Bones seem to be the acceptable face […]
The sisterhood of the skulls
Posted by Vale If Kutna Hora and Capela dos Ossos show anything it is that we cannot let bones lie. Buried and disinterred, stacked and stored these vast collections become places where the living can meet and marvel at the dead. In Naples, at the charnel house in the middle of its Fontanelle Cemetary, this […]
