A Good Send Off
A Good Send Off was the title of this year’s Centre for Death and Society (CDAS) annual conference. Well, part of the title – the snappy part. In full it read: A Good Send Off: Local, Regional & National Variations in how the British Dispose of their Dead. It took place last Saturday in Bath. […]
The Sunset coffin
“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” There’s a funeral industry variant on this saying. Substitute ‘coffin’ for ‘mousetrap’. Last week I went to see Sunset Coffins. Its development is the outcome of a partnership between an environmentally conscious funeral director and ironmonger, Jeremy Clutterbuck, and an engineer, […]
Fooneytunes
There are limitations to blogging. If a post looks overlong people won’t read it. So you need to stick to a single line of argument; you haven’t space to expand or balance. Once you’ve written it you must strip it down, starting with the best bits. As you contemplate clicking Publish, vanity warns you that […]
Sad ha ha
Throughout Funeraland, bothered undertakers, exasperated priests, weathervane secular celebrants, opportunistic accessorisers and furrow-browed academics are inserting their fingers into their mouths, holding them aloft, seeking to determine where the wind of change is blowing from. Funeral consumers give them little to go on. They don’t talk about funerals until they have to arrange one. When […]
Sods’ law
The funeral industry is right to be wary of those who claim to scrutinise it on behalf of consumers. After all, Jessica Mitford did much injury to the American funeral industry with an exposé which held it up to ridicule and focussed on price at the expense of value, and so was actually of very […]
Vile and baseless rumours
Yesterday I reported that rumours are swirling in Funeralland concerning the response of the People’s Undertaker to the release of the IPSOS-Mori funeral price comparison commissioned by the independent funeral directors’ trade association, SAIF — a survey which revealed Co-op charges to be, on average, higher than those in the independent sector despite its enjoyment […]
Memorial of a concentration camp
From the Nameless Dead blog: A 10-meter magnolia tree is planted in the center of Chile’s National Stadium where dictator Pinochet in 1973 imprisoned thousands of political prisoners who were tortured and killed. After planting the tree, the stadium doors are open to the public as a park; offering a space to stop, look again, […]
All Greek to them
If you are one of many who has incredulously endured a funeral conducted by a minister of religion for a dead person of known no faith, spare a thought for the people of Belgium, where the language feud (Dutch vs French) means that if you’re a French speaker in a Flemish suburb of Brussels, your […]
The Grim Stopper
England’s World Cup 1-1 draw against USA was brought about by the butterfingered England goalkeeper Robert Green. By way of neat symmetry, it’s worth recalling that when the USA achieved a shock win over England at the 1950 World Cup, the star on the day was the USA goalkeeper, Frank Borghi. And the point of […]
Only in America?
Scheduling a funeral for a loved one is not easy, especially when you can’t afford one. That’s the situation the family of Clementina Michelle Hagin, 34, found themselves in after her death Thursday. On Saturday afternoon, Lynn Sims, Hagin’s pastor at Life Changing Outreach Ministries off Martintown Road in North Augusta, organized a car wash […]
