Open air cremation – latest news of the appeal
On 19 and 20 January 2010 the Court of Appeal will hear the appeal of Davender Kumar Ghai against the prohibition of open air cremation upheld by the High Court in May 2009. It was a case made notorious by the intervention of Justice Secretary Jack Straw, who asserted that indigenous Britishers would be “upset […]
Digital floorboards
My friend Simon likes to say that no one’s internet history bears close inspection. He’s speaking for himself, mostly; he’s always flirted more dangerously with depravity than me. My history is saturated with death. Of its concomitant, sex, not a jot. Yes. How boring. It has not always been so. When my ex-wife got inside […]
Cross
Just once in a while things, if they are little enough and come in a cluster, can subvert the sunny disposition for which I am justly famous. This morning I was at Sutton Coldfield crematorium, my first time. I had already got the measure of the place. A telephone enquiry yesterday about whether there was […]
Comin’ for to carry you home
The Office if National Statistics (ONS) is beginning to release detailed stats showing who died of what last year. Fascinating. We’ll all be one of those, one day. All sorts of things I didn’t know. Twice as many women die of Alzheimer’s than men—a factor of men dying so much younger, I suppose. I was […]
Bad moon rising?
An interesting thing about undertaking is that you don’t have to come at it from a position of actually being an undertaker. Does that make no sense? Let me explain. I know how undertakers feel. I am a writer. It is very difficult to come at writing from the position of being a writer. My […]
This is a burning issue. Please act now!
http://www.lifeandlove.tv/video.cfm/cid/2003/vid/1190/preview/true The video above (I’m sorry, I can’t embed it) shows, or purports to show, an open-air cremation in Colorado. I am indebted to m’learned friend, the humane, wise and scholarly Pat McNally, for putting me onto it. It is the subject of his latest blog post. If you are not a regular reader of […]
Get it together
‘Loveable’ and ‘funeral director’ aren’t words that sidle up to each other and make friends. I can think of a little handful of hugely loveable funeral directors, but that’s only because I hang out with a heck of a lot. Up in Newcastle, Carl Marlow is one such. And what makes him loveable is not […]
What are funerals for?
By gum, you’ve got to feel a little sorry for Father Ed, haven’t you? Yes? Have you been following the hullabaloo? There he is one minute, letting off a bit of personal steam in his blog, as one does—and hark what discord follows. Sow a wind, reap a whirlwind. Press, radio and television, they’ve all […]
Death on the wireless
Interesting programme on Radio 4, Beyond This Life, in which Tim Gardam, Principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford, confronts our response to death in 21st-century Britain. He deals with what he describes as ‘modern confusion about death’, especially among secular people, summed up by one interviewee like this: “I don’t believe in God, but I […]
Vicar in a pickle
Our old friend Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells has been having some idle fun with the local vicar, Father Ed Tomlinson. The local paper has branded him a ranter and attacked him for attacking the modern funeral in his blog. Among his ‘rants’, this: “I have then stood at the Crem like a lemon, wondering why […]
