Free radicals
A waft of spring gets the blood coursing, makes your toes wiggle. It’s time to peep out of the burrow and see what’s up. I’ll tell you what’s up. Transitus is having a get together at Bowden House just outside Totnes. It’ll take a full three hours to get there, but it’s M5 almost all […]
Brummie rebel
When the present looks awful we seek refuge in the past. We fix on a time when we would have been safe. Is that why, when someone dies, we look for an undertaker who still dresses as he did in 1873? Maybe. There’s a lot of call for it. And Brits have a weakness for […]
A statement to the Good Funeral Guide from the GMB
The co-operative movement has a history to be proud of. Founded by working people for working people, its principles were formulated by the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844. Given its origins, it makes you blink and/or howl with disbelief to learn that Co-operative Funeralcare, the People’s Undertaker, has derecognised a trade union, the GMB. This seems […]
Ivan
To whom does grief belong? For whom should we grieve? How should we behave when we grieve and what should grief be allowed to spill over into? When motorists cut up a cortege, sound their horns and curse it for getting in the way we observe the collapse of community values and understand that death […]
Funeralcare screwupdate
At Teesside crematorium a family is waiting for the coffin containing the body of Olwyn Laidlaw to be carried from the hearse. They are fighting back tears. Then someone comes up to them and says, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this but that’s not your mum. I don’t know how it’s happened.’ Devastating. […]
Gnome, sweet gnome
If multiculturalism and meritocracy have undermined or overwhelmed Britishness, I have to confess that I’m all for it. We’re not the country we were twenty years ago, and all the better for it. Now that discrimination is taboo, barriers between us have fallen and we all appreciate, enjoy and indulge each other so much more. […]
A great and indispensable guide book for home funeralists
Great excitement here at GFG HQ. The latest edition of the Resource Guide – a Manual for Home Funeral Care has just arrived from Beth Knox at Crossings: Caring For Our Own at Death. Is it the very first copy to set foot on UK soil? I rather fancy it is. In the UK, as […]
The time has come to give celebrants their due
The business model of most busy undertakers subordinates the needs of consumers to the necessity to get things done—paperwork, prepping bodies (laying them out and dressing them), transport issues. The interests of the business and the interests of you, the consumer, conflict. In balancing, on the one hand, things to do against, on the other, […]
Dad buries dead son in back garden
There’s a tragic story doing the rounds of the papers concerning a lad in Scotland whose father buried him in the garden of his ex-council semi. Robert Milloy, known to all as Boab, (18) was hit by a train as he walked across a level crossing near his home. His father, Robert, is quoted as […]
Whose funeral is it anyway?
If you want to open a cattery in the UK you need a licence. Cat care is regulated. If you want to open a funeral home you need nothing of the sort, no exams, no professional qualifications, no previous experience—nothing. Anyone can do it, scoundrels, incompetents, sex-workers, school leavers, sociopaths, stand-up comics. The care of […]
