Richard Sage is up before the beak in Blackfriars Crown Court today. We can’t find what the charge is. Updates to follow, and all info welcome.
A survey just out shows that 70 per cent of people support statutory paid bereavement leave.
The record shows that churches, celebrant organisations and undertakers’ trade associations aren’t remotely interested in offering any leadership in the matter whatever. Are you aware of anything any of them has said on the matter?
This is curious. The vocational focus of people who work with the bereaved might be supposed to be the promotion of their emotional health. What else?
Presently, a bereaved person has no legal right to take time off after a bereavement beyond time off to make funeral arrangements and time off to attend the funeral. More detail here. In the words of Acas: “Employees cannot expect to be granted leave automatically. When leave isn’t granted, they may have to use their holiday allowance.”
Did you sign the e-petition got up by Lucy Herd? If you didn’t, it’s too late now; it’s closed.
What value can an employee offer when forced back into the workplace after a traumatic bereavement? Very little, you might think. But when presenting his private members Bill to the commons, Labour MP Tom Harris offered these examples:
“In one case that was recently televised on an episode of Channel 4’s “Undercover Boss”, a driver for the waste disposal company Biffa was forced back to work just a day after the loss of his daughter. In another tragic case a father, a builder, was expected back to work five days after he lost his daughter to sudden infant death syndrome. Despite feeling unready to return to work, having barely slept, the man was told to resume work or lose his job. On yet another occasion, a parent was given just three days off after the death of his four-year-old son. The funeral was arranged on the fourth day, leading to the man having to use up his paid holiday leave to attend.”
Harris’ Bill is awaiting its second reading in the Commons on 24 January 2014. There’s time yet for celebrants and undertakers to get their acts together.
Lobbying Parliament for an increase in the Social Fund Funeral Payment is all well and good. The campaign for statutory bereavement leave is the clear priority.
If you want to be buried in Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire, you’ll find the fees attractive but the rules, perhaps, restrictive. The parish council has placed a ban on coffins made from wicker, cardboard, bamboo or cotton. See the full document here.
Why so? It has been suggested to us that badgers may be at the bottom of this: that the parish council wants to disincentivise them from digging up the dead. We have not been able to verify this so, to be absolutely fair, we have to declare that we have no idea why certain coffins are preferred and others deterred.
If it turns out that badgers are the culprits responsible for this bureaucratic interference with the rights of Brits to bury their dead in anything they darn well please (so long as it doesn’t outrage public decency), where is the evidence that they dig up the dead?
The answer to that is that the there are numerous reported incidences of badgers disrespecting our dormitories of the dead. You can check out a selection by clicking here, here, here, here and here.
The diet of yer average badger comprises mostly earthworms and leatherjackets. But they are also known to predate on hedgehogs, lambs and rabbits.
They are also known to take carrion.
Including the flesh of dead humans? Well, not to our knowledge, and we’ve done a fair amount of digging over the years to get to the bottom of this myth. Even those burial grounds that commendably bury shallow report no incursions by foxes and badgers. Simply, the theory goes, nature’s larder affords them tastier fare. Where badgers have dug up dead people in burial grounds this has been in the course of ‘clumsy’ pursuit of their normal diet. Their disturbance of the dead has been inadvertent — they have merely shouldered them aside.
Have Cambridgeshire’s badgers moved the goalposts? We have invited Fowlmere Parish Council to account for its ban on certain coffins, and you can, too. The name of the clerk to the council is Mrs Jackie Wright and her email address is
parishclerk
The parish council will next meet on 17 December, and Mrs Wright has undertaken to draw the attention of the councillors to an email I sent on 21 November asking to know why they have banned ‘eco’ coffins. You may wish to do the same.
The GFG blog represents all points of view. If you’ve got something to say and an urge to say it, we’d be pleased to publish it here. We reach close to 2000 people every day, so this is a good place to get your message out. Send your words to charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk.
Posted by Richard Rawlinson
It’s a financial institution that should symbolise business and social integrity: mutual co-operation for the benefit of customers, employees and just causes. Instead, it’s scarred by dodgy financial transactions, cronyism and scandal.
But despair not. There’s one man who may yet sort out the mess, a leader already showing remarkable ROI (return on investment) since taking charge of the wider organisation to which the bank belongs.
Not for him senior ranking officials lining the pockets of criminal drug barons and pimps. Neither hypocritical champagne socialist nor unbridled hedge fund capitalist, he’s bringing decency and common sense to the table. What’s more, he has plenty of experience of the funeral business and of distributing food to the needy.
I’m referring to Pope Francis, who has brought in outside experts to the Vatican Bank to raise standards of transparency and probity, and investigate rumours of links to Mafia money laundering.
The Pope’s empathy with the downtrodden is resulting in an increase in church attendance around the world. He’s even replacing Obama as the pin-up of the secular left [see here http://www.theguardian.com/
But he might not be so popular with everyone when he’s wearing his CEO hat to counter corruption and excessive bureaucracy within the Vatican itself. Some reports even claim the Mafia is already plotting to kill him.
I hope I’m right to be skeptical about such rumours. Italian mobsters are strangely pious: they do things like kiss their rosary before shooting an enemy’s brains out. They also rarely act before carrying out a cost-benefit analysis, and hitting the head of the Catholic Church would surely be a catastrophic own goal.
The GFG blog represents all points of view. If you’ve got something to say and an urge to say it, we’d be pleased to publish it here. We reach close to 2000 people every day, so this is a good place to get your message out. Send your words tocharles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk.
The Co-operative — What Makes Us Different
“I sometimes wonder if the greatest institutional problem of our time is not plain, unvarnished evil, but this obsession with Ethics as an outward form, with compliance rather than conscience. The whole idea of an Ethical business, as distinct from a normal one which behaves ethically, is flawed. Today, business after business, organisation after organisation, babbles about corporate responsibility, transparency, openness, saving the planet etc. Like executive versions of the Pharisees, they proclaim, “God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are.” Later, expensively, we discover that they are as other men are, or even a bit worse; and for some reason we are surprised.”
Charles Moore here.
Kimberlyrenee Gamboa’s son Kyle took his own life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in September, three weeks into his senior year in high school.
A seemingly happy 18-year-old with lots of friends and into competitive lasertag, Kyle’s death was such a shock, his mother said, she doesn’t know how she’d have managed it through a typical funeral.
Instead, with help from her church and and home death guide, Heidi Boucher, Kyle’s body was returned to the family home one day after his death. Boucher washed Kyle and helped arrange the body on dry ice changed every 24 hours; she gathered information to fill out Kyle’s death certificate and managed all coordination with the mortuary. For three full days, Kyle’s body lay in the family living room in an open casket, not embalmed. During that time, day and night, surrounded by pictures and candles and flowers, all of his friends and family could say good-bye and remember his short life. For Kyle’s mother, that time was critical to her healing.
The Coffinmaker from Dan McComb on Vimeo.
“I think one of the most important aspects of the coffin is that it can be carried. And I think we’re meant to carry each other, and I think carrying someone you love, committing them, is very important for us that we deal with death; we want to know that we have played our part and that we have shouldered our burden. So, if we make it too convenient, then we’re depriving ourselves of a chance to get stronger so that we can carry on.”
“It changes the funeral from something you watch to something you do … All the coffins we use have working handles, six of them. This means that anyone can carry it without worrying about dropping it or not being the same height … If you want to be involved in a funeral, really involved, carry the coffin … Feel the uncompromising weight, the handles biting into your hand. Let your body form a physical memory of this moment … Feel what’s happening … You have honoured them with effort; you can do no more.” Rupert Callender. Listen to his Pause for Thought on BBC Radio Devon here.
Posted by Richard Rawlinson
Paul Flowers was a successful man: chairman of Co-operative Bank, Labour councillor and Methodist minister. He’s now shunned by all three pillars of the establishment—business, politics and church—after his penchant for taking crystal meth with male prostitutes hit the headlines.
When Flowers first hooked up with Manchester Lads escort Ciaron Dodd, he took him to see the play, You Can’t Take It With You, at Manchester’s Royal Exchange theatre. This was, of course, followed by sex and drugs back at the hotel.
You can’t take it with you. This is certainly true of a fat cat salary. But you can spend your earnings in plenty of ways that don’t stop you taking your reputation with you.
We’ve all met characters like Flowers: high-achievers and do-gooders who also live dangerously by indulging their less reputable side; risk-takers who want to have their cake and eat it.
We often feel some satisfaction when such human juggernauts are stopped in their tracks, when those made ebullient by deference to their status are brought down to earth when they’re given a dose of humble pie after their flaws are exposed.
Flowers may become a better man as a result of his downfall. He’s deemed a useless banker due to his involvement in the Co-operative Bank, whose massive debts may yet result in the selling of Co-operative Funeralcare. He’s also deemed a hypocritical sleazeball due to private decadence in relation to his socio-political and religious roles in the community.
How would a funeral celebrant deal with such a eulogy challenge?
The GFG blog represents all points of view. If you’ve got something to say and an urge to say it, we’d be pleased to publish it here. We reach close to 2000 people every day, so this is a good place to get your message out. Send your words to charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk.
The winter cold is beginning to nip your ears and gnaw your toes. Time to order some of Yuli Somme’s Foot Felts — incredibly warm, snug insoles for your shoes or boots. Here at the GFG-Batesville Shard, where austerity measures forbid us from turning on the heat until evening, we swear by them. Honestly, they’re brilliant. At just £6 a pair they’re very affordable. They are also, as you might expect of Yuli, compostable when they wear out. And what better way to toast your toes than with offcuts of shrouds? One undertaker gave them to her entire family as Christmas presents. Buy em here.
Up in Yorkshire James Hardcastle of The Carriage Master is ready to help out funeral directors and people arranging their own funeral when the snows fall – as they will – and hearses are reduced to slithering idiots. He has, available for hire, Range Rover Vogues that’ll get you to the iciest crematorium on time, or up the track of the most inaccessible natural burial ground. Find all the details here: The Carriage Master snow hearse
The GFG blog represents all points of view. If you’ve got something to say and an urge to say it, we’d be pleased to publish it here. We reach close to 2000 people every day, so this is a good place to get your message out. Send your words to charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk.
“One version of the “better” that mutuals have to be is that they have to be seen by customers to be more “decent” than other businesses – because that provides a motive for some consumers to spend their money with them.
And the second version of the better is that they have to be conspicuously competent.
It won’t have escaped your notice that the appointment as Co-op Bank’s chairman of a former local councillor with an apparent taste for hard drugs, a history of downloading porn on to a municipally owned computer and – by his own admission – limited knowledge of modern banking, somewhat undermines Co-op’s claims to be better than the rest in both those important senses.
Which is why Co-op Group’s review of its internal democratic system, that allowed the Rev Flowers to bloom quite so lustrously in the organisation, will have an important bearing on whether co-ops and mutuals will continue to be an important part of the UK’s mixed economy.“
“In 2007 The Co-operative Board de-recognised GMB after more than 100 years, terminating a relationship that went back to the 19th Century Victorian era. This was a sad day for democracy, Trade Union rights and ethics given the background of The Co-operative movement, a group owned by its members which claims to be ‘Different.’
The Co-operative then found itself ostracised form the wider TUC movement … banned from TUC and Labour Party Conferences, Tolpuddle Martyrs festival, Workers Beer events, Wortley Hall and a whole host of other events and activities where they had been previously welcomed. “
