The surprising satisfactions of a home funeral
For all that the funeral industry is aware of pressure to change, and has readied itself for that, and for all that newspapers like to run features about nice, funny coffins, nothing has essentially changed. Death occurs. A stranger – a funeral director – accompanied by another stranger, his or her assistant, come to take […]
Dates for your diary (2)
Date: 12-14 June (choose your day or come to all three). Venue: Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire. Event: National Funeral Exhibition. This trade show is a biennial shindig. Funeral directors fly in from all corners of the country to feast their eyes everything new in the world of funerals. Not that there is anything new, of course. […]
Dates for your diary (1)
Those lovely people at Transitus are holding their first-ever festival on Saturday 20 June. What’s the draw? Dorset for a start. Always a special place at this time of the year. And Sturminster Newton, the venue, is a special place. And Dr Peter Fenwick. Peter Fenwick! He’s a man worth crossing the country to hear. […]
The bigger they come the harder they fall
Here’s a problem for a species of mathematician: Exactly how big can a funeral directing enterprise get before it topples into incompetence and scandal? The same law of economics would, you think, apply to funeral directing as to, say, cars: expansion creates economies of scale and efficiencies of production which make your product both competitive […]
Something to celebrate
A while back I blogged about celebrants. The essence of my argument was that people do not get to choose their celebrant from the range available locally because funeral directors, who like to hold all service providers in their thrall, do not offer them a selection. Very soon they’ll have no choice. There’s now an […]
Cybertwaddle
There are very few funeral directors in the UK with a web presence. Many of those who do fail to understand that the job of a website is twofold: first, to offer a relationship of warmth and trust; second, to proclaim capability and professionalism. A good many undertakerly websites simply advertise ineptitude. Clumsy prose, wonky […]
Sex and death
Today’s papers have enjoyed this story—the ones you’d expect, the funloving Sun and the _____________ (supply your own adjective) Daily Mail. It’s a story which emanates, so it seems, from the Wales News Service, whose website offers this enticement: “Have you been betrayed by your man? Or did you get revenge on your love rat? […]
Space oddity
In November I blogged about EternalSpace, a “meaningful online destination that creates a personal connection with a loved one.” Back then it was at an early stage of development. It’s up and running. You can now see examples of virtual monuments in what its developers call an “immersive, multidimensional landscape where well-wishers may sign the […]
Bad taste is better than no taste at all
Funerals are looking for a new aesthetic. People are looking for new ways of memorialising their dead. Brooding Victorian monumental gloom is out. So too is the regimented eezi-mow municipal cemetery with its ranks of polished anonymous headstones. In rejection of these, people are presently opting for one of two diametrically different alternatives. Either they […]
The Grim Reaper requests the pleasure…
This blog is going for a few days’ holiday by the sea on its island home somewhere in the English Channel. For the duration its thoughts will, unwontedly, be with the living (ie, those who have not yet died). But it undertakes to return in dead earnest. Mortified? Then while away some of the time […]
