Confessions of a bachelor
Posted by Richard Rawlinson There aren’t many taboos left but what I’m about to say somehow feels like a confession: I’m among the 2.5 million people in the UK aged between 45 and 64 who live alone, without spouse, partner or family member. Whether due to relationship breakdowns or genuine life choice, this figure for middle-aged […]
What price peace of mind?
It’s been another very bad day at the office for the financial product known as the funeral plan, demonstrating its attractiveness to cheats and scammers. Sooner or later some devious little twerp is going to do a runner with a shedful. Some reckon they know who that twerp is. Yorkshire Asset Protection, a financial services […]
Reaching the Fathers
The second in a series of guest posts which consider the question, ‘What is the purpose of a funeral?’ by Jenny Uzzell The first ‘purpose’ of funerals that I am going to consider is the one that, arguably, has the least relevance to most people in the modern western world. For most of human history […]
Come on down to Bournemouth!
It’s still not too late to book for the Good Funeral Awards weekend in Bournemouth from 6-8 September. There’s already a great crowd coming — more than ever before. Our host will be Pat Butcher – the actress Pam St Clement – who will be handing out the awards and taking questions about her deathbed […]
What a wonderful thing!
Hat tip Michael Jarvis From the Daily Telegraph 26 August 2013.
A eulogy sandwich is not enough to nourish grief
As Jenny Uzell embarks on a series of posts which will consider the knotty question, What Is A Funeral For? it’s worth reflecting on what has been a game of two halves, funeralwise, in the last fortnight. Two people have expressed contrasting approaches to a funeral. First, there was Dave Smith, who arranged the funeral […]
A wee whiff of Auld Reekie
The stopping train takes more or less forever to get to Edinburgh through the fertile fracking fields of the desolate north-east. I’d been invited to look round Scotmid Co-operative Funeral Directors. Scotmid is a small, independent members’ co-operative dating back to 1859. It owns 10 funeral homes. Like all co-operatives, it both co-operates and competes with […]
A take on the afterlife
Posted by Richard Rawlinson, our religious correspondent Heaven, Hell and Purgatory are states of a human soul, not places as often represented in human language. In Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas, writes: ‘Incorporeal things are not in place after a manner known to us, in which way we say that bodies are in place; but they […]
The Purpose of Funerals: Overview
The first in a major series of posts by guest blogger Jenny Uzell, scholar and undertaker One of the highlights of the National Funeral Exhibition for me earlier this year (other than the chance to contemplate, yet again, the many ways in which my life has taken an unexpected turn for the bizarre) was hearing […]
Absence of belief is not the be-all and end-all
In an article in the Telegraph, atheist Brendan O’Neill asks: When did atheists become so teeth-gratingly annoying? Surely non-believers in God weren’t always the colossal pains in the collective backside that they are today? Surely there was a time when you could say to someone “I am an atheist” without them instantly assuming you were […]
