Is the Co-op arranging its own funeral?
Co-op woes have filled the business pages of all our newspapers in recent weeks. The accelerating degenerative disorder afflicting this once-great business has caught them all on the hop, running to catch up. For years its sacred-cow status seems to have protected it from rigorous scrutiny. In the minds of pretty much everybody the Co-op was […]
A question of timing
It can’t be easy writing episodes for soaps. You have to take over a plot designed by a committee and steer your characters through the storyline as plausibly as you can. Sometimes you have to get rid of them, a procedure known as ‘killing off’. You mostly don’t have to actually do them in, you […]
Die-alogue Cafe
First there was Death Café. Then Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death. Then Death Salon. Now there’s Die-alogue Cafe Die-alogue Café has been developed by an Australian academic, Stuart Carter. We’ve been talking to Stuart for some time. We like and respect him very much. His purpose is not to upstage other formats, but […]
Poppy is hiring
Poppy Mardall is looking for her young company’s third full-time employee. Her fresh approach to the business of funerals makes this a job more suitable, perhaps, for someone outside the industry. But she is very open to applications from those within it who feel that her philosophy is also their philosophy. She says: This is […]
Classic
When Pomponius Atticus [a friend of Cicero] fell ill, and medical attempts to prolong his existence merely prolonged his pain, he decided that the best solution was to starve himself to death. No need to petition a court in those days, citing the terminal deterioration in your ‘quality of life’: Atticus, being a Free Ancient. […]
Clarissa Tan
If you came to last year’s Good Funeral Awards weekend, you will remember Clarissa Tan. She was the journalist from the Spectator magazine. She had breast cancer. The piece she wrote afterwards inspired the name of this year’s get-together in Bournville: the Ideal Death Show. Clarissa has died of breast cancer aged 42. ‘I am […]
Many Flowers in Carshalton (part 1)
David Hall, of Vintage Lorry Funerals, always speaks to the Florist who is creating the Family’s Floral Tributes at the earliest opportunity after his lorry has been booked for a funeral. David designs a layout that will feature the Family’s Tributes prominently, he makes a sketch of his ideas and emails it to the Family […]
What’s for love and what’s for money?
If there’s one thing that really vexes people in the funerals business it’s the question of who gets paid for what – and how much. Take the business of conducting a funeral. In England, when C of E clergy moved their fee up to £160 + travel, lots of people howled. Everyone in England is […]
Are secular rituals too churchy?
Posted by Richard Rawlinson ‘Organising atheists is like herding cats’. Richard Dawkins Every so often, civil celebrants here revive the debate about rituals in secular funerals. Some point out there’s plenty of spirituality already in a unique eulogy and individually-chosen readings and music, and enough symbolism with the procession of the coffin, the lighting of candles, […]
Don’t expect Dignity to solve funeral poverty
Yesterday we let the interns loose on the blog and they impulsively passed on an appeal to readers to write to Mike McCollum of Dignity plc and ask him to do his bit in the fight against funeral poverty. What they conspicuously failed to do was identify a single reason why Mr McCollum and Dignity […]
