Author: Charles

Open air cremation – latest news of the appeal

7 November 2009
Charles
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Categories: open-air cremation

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 and offended” by funeral pyres and “find it abhorrent that human remains were being burnt in this way”. Read previous blog posts here and here.

I have just had an email from Andrew Singh Bogan, legal co-ordinator of the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society:

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission has been granted permission to formally intervene in the legal proceedings. They will present their own arguments before the Court of Appeal in support of our arguments.

Given the Commission’s prominence, resources and impartiality, it might be an idea for you guys to contact them directly to inform them of your support. This could enable your support to receive far greater exposure…and allow help us to escape censure for submitting late evidence!

However, the Commission’s legal team (headed by counsel from Matrix Chambers) would not appreciate any possibility of us ‘feeding’ them evidence, so any approach should make clear the independence and impartiality of your support. It is fine to say you recently made with the AAFS charity [Anglo-Asian Friendship Society] and we have informed you of the Commission’s intervention.

Why has the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) felt impelled to intervene? Because it wants to “draw the court’s attention to Article 27 of the International Covenant for the Protection of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which contains the ‘right of ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities to enjoy their own religion [and] to profess and practice [sic] their own religion.’” It also wants to draw the attention of the court to related declarations by the United Nations and the Council of Europe.

Is it good to see an influential body like the EHRC get behind this appeal? Up to a point, perhaps. But I wonder if it could be counter-productive and play to the xenophobic lobby, something which Straw has already so deftly and successfully done.

Is this appeal just about securing an exemption for a tiny minority of Hindus to practise their faith? I earnestly hope not. It has to be about securing the right of anyone at all, of much faith or none whatever, to opt for open air cremation. As Rupert Callender of the Green Funeral Company has observed: “The recent excavations at the Stonehenge complex show that ritually cremating our dead outdoors is at the heart of our culture. This is about reclaiming ritual … It is what the natural death movement is all about- the truth.”

I hope that Andrew—who is India at the moment, and very busy—will be able to clear this up for us. Either this is a matter of individual liberty for all citizens of the UK, or it is nothing at all. My jury is presently AWOL.

If you would like to offer your support, email Matrix Chambers: katy.reade@equalityhumanrights.com


Digital floorboards

4 November 2009
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Digital will

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 my computer she discovered correspondence which expedited the divorce. I was shocked by the invasion and delighted with the outcome.

But that’s another story.

What happens if you drop dead in, say, the next five minutes? Or tonight? Or even, to help you get used to the idea, tomorrow morning at 11.43? What happens to all your cyberstuff?

There are two sides to this. First, while your grievers are buoying themselves up by bravely singing along with Celine – “Near, far, wherever you are / I believe that the heart does go on” – it won’t be just your heart. So too will your email account, Facebook page and other digital testimony of your extantcy. You’ll want them to be able to stop the banter, spare themselves, terminate you.

Second, you’ll want them to be able to access accounts, either to close them or get their hands on the money and the digital media and whatever else you’ve got out there of monetary or sentimental value stored in a cloud server somewhere.

They won’t be able to do either unless they know, 1) what to look for, and 2) what the passwords are.

I remember sitting with a newly widowed widow who couldn’t begin to start winding up her husband’s affairs because she could even get into his computer. The password for that, together with all the others inside, died with him. Heaven only knows what she did in the end. Did she ever discover where all his funds were? I don’t know that she did.

There may be some passwords you want to die with you—even if you can’t be prosecuted posthumously. But there are others which you will want to be available. Where can you keep them where no one can find them until the undertaker’s men come to zip you up in a bag and clonk you downstairs?

Awareness of all this is growing—as it needs to. And the answer is arriving—you guessed it—online. Of all the solution providers out there, the one I like best is offered by Deathswitch. Once you’ve stored all your secrets with them they prod you at intervals decided by you: they send you an email to which you must reply. If you don’t, they e-poke you a couple of times. If you still show no signs of life they decide you are definitely dead and contact those people you have designated with messages you composed while still alive.

Google Deathswitch and you’ll find lots of stuff about what they, and others like them, do. There’s a piece in the Guardian here. And the Telegraph here.

They all draw attention to the two major drawbacks of putting all your eggs in one cyberbasket. First, what if the website dies first? Second, what if it gets hacked?

Progress is a wonderful thing. But let’s hear it for floorboards. Even after all these years, hard to beat.

Cross

3 November 2009
Charles
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Categories: Humanists

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 a funeral immediately after ‘mine’ yielded the most remorseless lecture I have ever had from a public servant about the vital importance of keeping within my appointed limits: 20 minutes. Twenty minutes! Once there, I went to strike up an acquaintance with the organist-CD chap. The service before ‘mine’ was over and the mourners were departing to the strains of—you guessed it. “Good heavens,” I said to him, “My Way. What a most unusual song to play at a funeral.” He looked at me with weary earnestness and said it was the song he played most. I was in an irony-free zone. I got ‘my’ funeral off at the stroke of twelve noon. It was always going to be a close run thing, cramming a goodbye to a tremendously nice and loved man into twenty minutes. In the event, we had to do without the interlude for silent reflection, hurry the farewell a little, wrap it up just in time. Only when it was over did I discover that the next funeral was a ‘committal only’—the dead chap had already had his funeral in church and had just come to be burnt. His lot were in and out in five minutes. We could have had five/ten mins of their half hour, no problem, they never would have minded. But when the needs of the institution are greater than those of its users, give and take go out of the window. Still, at least the funeral director was nice to me. “Thank you so much for taking this for us,” she said. I didn’t have the energy to point out that the relicts had phoned and booked me direct, that I was working for them, not her. I just left.

And came home to an article in the Guardian of such pusillanimity that it actually got under my skin. It’s by a creep called Phil Hall, who describes himself as a “socialist, a college/university lecturer and teacher trainer based in west London. He’s African by birth, English by culture and in love with all things Mexican.” In other words, a man who’s completely up himself. This is what he says:

There are many contrasting approaches to the arrangement of funerals, from the religious to the secular. But after five deaths and four funerals over the last two years, it seems to me that the humanist way of death is the most salutary.

Wonder what happened to the fifth funeral.

This is because it accepts one simple truth. Human life is constructed like a story. It has a beginning, high points, low points and then ends – definitively.

The humanist way of death recognises the fact that you will die and that when you do, that will be the story of you. From the viewpoint of our human, third person narrative, isn’t the idea of heaven a little irritating? A life, like a good book, should never end in: ” … to be continued.” Life only really makes sense as biography.

In contrast, religious funerals, where a stranger usually officiates and witters on about heaven, often fail to commemorate a life well lived properly. Religious funerals can be a whimpering anti-climax.

You can see where this is going. It’s just lazy, beastly dawkinism. But an existential event as a narrative event? I hadn’t thought of that. Now that’s really stupid. He goes on (can you take it?):

When Uncle Heini died this month at the age of 99 there was a lot to celebrate about his life. He survived two world wars honourably. Heini was flamboyant and kind. In his 80s he was still travelling from Machu Picchu to China. He even went climbing in the Himalayas at the age of 85. Heini was a well-known actor and a famous clown in the Munich theatre.

But his funeral was completely out of keeping with this, and I blame religion and its obsession with the afterlife for that. It put a damper on an occasion that should have been far more representative of who he really was. The crematorium orchestra played Albinoni and Bach, an actress read out a poem, the theatre administrator gave a thoughtful speech, and then a Lutheran pastor stood up with a wan smile and gave her homily. It was full of religious platitudes. In half an hour Heini’s divine reispass was stamped, his celestial ticket clipped. And that was it; curtains.

Phil, you pillock, if you don’t want a Lutheran pastor or any other kind of pastor to talk resurrection at your funeral, DON’T BLOODY INVITE ONE. (Love the crem orchestra, though. In your dreams.)

A little bit of believe and let believe would go a long way from our atheist brothers and sisters. The Zero Militant is becoming tiresome.

Not for the first time (this is unrelated) I wonder why it is that atheists bring their dead people to a funeral. Come on, chaps, think it through: it’s nobbut carcass!

Read Phil’s drivel here.

Comin’ for to carry you home

2 November 2009
Charles
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Categories: What do we die of and when?

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 surprised by the number of perinatal deaths; I thought there were more. Gosh, 87 men died last year of breast cancer…

The NHS enables you to do a little light prognosticating on your own behalf. Have a play with its Atlas of Risk here.

Have a pore over the ONS spreadsheet here.

Bad moon rising?

23 October 2009
Charles
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Categories: funeral cost, funeral directors

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 good friend Christopher is a writer. He wrote a very successful book. Nigel Slater, Monty Don and Anna Pavord raved about it. Result? Penury. Very few writers strike lucky enough to make a living from writing (though their agents and publishers do well enough out of them). They need to do other things. If Christopher wants to finish his next book (it’s about forests and promises to be just as brilliant as Forgotten Fruits) he needs to broaden his earning base, bustle a bit, do some journalism or copywriting, a few shifts pushing trolleys at B&Q, a newspaper round, whatever. A bit on the side. I once did time in prison. As a teacher. It was quite a good little earner—until I was sacked. I am now an occasional funeral celebrant. It keeps my financial scoreboard ticking over. But it keeps me from my writing. There’s no winning combination.

Just about everyone else can make a living by pursuing single-issue careers, lucky people. Surgeons. Electricians. Brazilian waxers. Dog groomers. They don’t need their bit on the side.

Undertakers began as portfolio workers. They were builders or joiners. Undertaking was a sideline. Nowadays, though they are undertakers first and foremost, they still can’t make a living out of it, dammit. No, they need their bit on the side, too. So they have to work hard to make themselves indispensable in all areas of funeral planning—to be a one-stop shop for everything you need. Which is why they collect fees on behalf of crematoriums, priests, celebrants and burial grounds, making themselves responsible for the debts of their clients. Desperate lunacy! It is why they have to hold all service and merchandise providers, people who do things they can’t, in hired dependency. Thrall is all.

It’s a terribly delicate business model and it can so easily fall apart. Why? Because undertaking is so easily relegated to an ancillary service. Because there’s so little to it. Result? Hirer hired. Anyone can set themselves up as a funeral arranger and turn the tables—a monumental mason, a celebrant, an event organiser.

Is it all unravelling for the funeral directors? Not necessarily. But they need to smarten up, definitely. Old school funeral directors have failed to address the disconnect between the care of the body and the creation of the funeral ceremony. For most, these remain separate specialisms—and where clients want a religious ceremony they’ll always be so. But the rise of the secular ceremony gives a funeral director the opportunity to offer exactly what their clients want: a joined up service. Most are intellectually incapable of this.

Down in Devon, green fuse hire mortuary facilities from local funeral directors, where they care for the bodies entrusted to them. Family Tree and the Green Funeral Company, both of whom have their own mortuaries, are also rare, triumphant exceptions, the best it gets—but, like my friend Christopher, I don’t suppose they’ll ever be troubling the financial services industry. They are content in their honourable estate of relative poverty, happy in their own skins, terrifically nice people.

Funeral directors live in ever-present danger of someone better coming along and enslaving them. And the news is that their newest threat has arrived. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for: the funeral consultant!

I have been contacted by two such in the last month, both of them ex-funeral directors who can use their insider knowledge to muscle down prices for their clients. One is Andrew Hickson at Your Choice Funerals. I won’t tell you who the other one is until he has got his website sorted.

Will the news of their advent cause the marmalade to drop from the nerveless fingers of breakfasting funeral directors the length and breadth of the land?

There’s always going to be a market for a cheaper funeral . But my feeling is that people are going to be reluctant to accede to the care of their dead person being subordinated in any way. What do you think?

While you consider, go straight to Amazon and order your copy of Forgotten Fruits.

This is a burning issue. Please act now!

22 October 2009
Charles
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Categories: funeral pyres, open-air cremation

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 Pat’s blog you can look forward to many happy hours in his archive. It’s a treasure trove.

Here in the UK the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society is preparing to go to Court of Appeal to contest the ban on open-air cremation upheld in the High Court in May 2009, a case notorious for the intervention of that conspicuous enemy of liberty, the Justice Secretary Jack Straw. He placed open-air cremation in a context of cultural barbarity, opining that evolved, indigenous Britishers would be “upset and offended” by funeral pyres and “find it abhorrent that human remains were being burnt in this way”. He thus set open-air cremation firmly in its place alongside honour killing, the stoning of homosexuals, the mutilation of minor criminals and all manner of exotic, benighted, imported cruelty. The message to our brown-skinned brothers and sisters was clear: you can’t come over here and do that sort of thing in a civilised country like this.

There was very little backlash against Mr Straw’s disdainful dismissal of the funerary rites of a mere 800 million Hindus worldwide. Indeed, many British Hindus lent strength to his argument by declaring that they were perfectly happy to go down to t’crem and be clinically incinerated like anyone else.

Straw created a potent sideshow. Open-air cremation is, he said, culturally alien and aesthetically unacceptable. Neither point of view stands a second’s scrutiny, yet he carried the day. His reasoning was puerile and you need to challenge it.

First, let’s lift open-air cremation out of the cultural cesspit into which Straw contemptuously dumped it. It is not the preserve of a minority of Hindus. It is a disposal option favoured by people of all sorts and all races, of all religions and of none.

And we’re not talking about opening floodgates here. If open-air cremation were to be re-legalised (its present ban is of dubious legality), would the sun all at once be darkened by the smoke of burning carcasses? Would it happen in beauty spots, waste ground, people’s back gardens? Of course not. Firstly, only a very few people would opt for it. Secondly, they would do it lovingly, privately. No one would notice—unless they’d been invited.

There’s a very simple issue of personal liberty at stake here. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of people whose actions adversely affect no one else.

There’s also an irony at work. Step forward, please, Dr Price!

Who?

William Price first attracted attention as a schoolboy by reading poetry as he walked through the countryside naked. After qualifying as a doctor he became involved in revolutionary politics. He was a druid, given to wearing a red waistcoat, green trousers and a fox pelt on his head.

In 1883, when he was 80, he took as his lover a woman sixty years younger. With her he had a son whom he named Jesus Christ. Jesus died when he was five months old. In accordance with ancient druidical practice, Dr Price proceeded to burn his body. A horrified crowd gathered and snatched the body from the flames. Price was prosecuted. He was acquitted, and the judgement delivered that cremation is legal so long as no nuisance is caused to others.

It was a landmark ruling. When it was made, the furnace of Cremation Society’s first crematorium at Woking had lain unfired since its installation five years previously, timorously awaiting a legal green flag. Dr Price secured the breakthrough the Cremation Society had been hoping for and, without further ado, the pioneering (if prostrate) Mrs Pickersgill became Woking’s first client.

The cogency of the judgement remains incontestable. So long as no nuisance is caused to others, cremation is legal. The irony of the judgement remains poignant: it was brought about by an indigenous open-air cremationist.

If you want to lend your voice to the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society’s appeal, please write now to Andrew Singh Bogan: info@anglo-asian.org.

Get it together

21 October 2009
Charles
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Categories: Processions

‘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 so much his warmth and zest, though he’s brimming with these. No, what makes your affections for Carl go the extra mile is his sheer naughtiness. It’s a very humane and serious species of naughtiness and it impels him to do things others would never think of.

Is he a genius? Yes, he is. Half saint, half scamp. The very best sort of saint.

He’s made it to today’s Sun with the story of a funeral only he could have suggested. All the mourners set off for the crem in a 49-seater coach with their dead person in the boot. Cheerful. And (don’t overlook this) cheap. Everyone together, not dispersed in ones and twos in cars and buses.

Read the story in the Sun here. See Carl on YouTube here.

What are funerals for?

21 October 2009
Charles
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Categories: ceremony

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 gone berserk, done him to death. Result: cacophony. There’s no making any sense of the kneejerk hollering and hooting because most of it has been generated by ignorance of what he actually said. The truth will almost always get in the way of a good story. Do you remember when a howling mob of paedophile hunters surrounded the house of a paediatrician? It’s all got a bit like that.

Down at the British Humanist Association, Tana Wollen, Head of Ceremonies, seems not to have allowed truth to stand in the way of a good soundbite. “What a shame,” she says, “that this particular priest seems more concerned with his own feelings than allowing bereaved people a ceremony that reflects their beliefs and wishes and those of the loved ones they have lost.” No, Tana, no. Father Ed is pro-choice. What he actually says is: “Naturally there will be those who disagree with my beliefs; I think they should have the right to exercise this choice even though I believe them to be misguided.”

We can sympathise with Tana if she was nettled by Father Ed’s assertion that “I am not, like the humanist, running a business and seeking financial gain from funerals.” You’re way off the mark there, Father Ed. The exchange of monies for post-mortem goods and services is a well established and perfectly respectable practice. For you, it comes in your stipend.

You don’t have to be a religionist to sympathise with any priest who, charged with conducting a funeral according to the rites of his or her sect, watches their words fall on empty or hostile eyes. To feel like a lemon under those circs is only human. Why do so many unbelievers ask for religious funerals? Yes, that is the question. And as Father Ed justifiably asks, “if this is your position, why invite me to the party? … If there is no desire for this Christian dimension then why have the priest?”

For all that, it is easy to be enraged by the Church’s record in performing funerals. Father Ed and many of his ilk take pains, I’m sure, to do it properly. But too many funerals have been, and still are, perfunctory and impersonal, conducted by ministers who couldn’t give a damn. The C of E in particular has a case to answer.

Do we do funerals well in this country? It’s a good and important question, one at the heart of Father Ed’s ‘rant’. He says: “I was actually seeking to raise a question which is important for all society – what are funerals for?”

It’s a question we need to ask ourselves all the time. It’s Father Ed’s beef that “Christian prayers of ‘commendation and committal’ are not mere aesthetic choices in a market place of funeral options.” In other words, he doesn’t like being used merely as a nice funeral venue that knows how to put on a nice show. And yet his Church (if not his church) is happy enough to indulge those who wish to use its photogenic buildings and genial rites for nice weddings.

Thomas Friese’s response to Father Ed is, I think, spot on: “We may deeply lament the fact that such superficial attention is given in our society to such an important transition and sincerely believe we know better. But if that is so, then it is up to us to convince others of its importance.”

Yes. What are funerals for? Let’s keep asking ourselves that, urgently. Thank you for getting them talking, Father Ed. You’re a prop forward, so you must have broad shoulders. You’ll be needing them in the peace-shattered aftermath of your unsuspecting little blog post.

Death on the wireless

19 October 2009
Charles
No comments
Categories: Secular approaches to death

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 do believe in heaven.” Gardam talks about secular beliefs as a mish-mash of pantheism, folk religion and superstition, contrasts them unfavourably with the ‘clarity and directness’ of the Moslem way of death, and pitches literal Moslem interpretations of the Koran against evolving and increasingly fuzzy Christian interpretations of the Bible, especially in matters of final judgement, heaven and hell. He concludes by looking forward to next week, when he will visit the National Funeral Exhibition and discuss our present day terror of oblivion.

Not how I see it, but you may find food for thought. Listen within the next 6 days here.

Vicar in a pickle

19 October 2009
Charles
No comments
Categories: ceremony

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 on earth I am present at the funeral of somebody led in by the tunes of Tina Turner, summed up in pithy platitudes of sentimental and secular poets and sent into the furnace with ‘I did it my way’ blaring out across the speakers! To be brutally honest I can think of a hundred better ways of spending my time as a priest on God’s earth. What is the point of my being present if spiritually unwanted?”

Over here at the Good Funeral Guide, we are right behind you, Father Ed. Lift up your heart, lift up your voice!

Read of the travails of this blameless cleric here.

Read his insane effusions here.