Now we are five
Ooh, the conjurer’s just arrived. Yes, it’s all party hats and facepainting over here at the GFG-Batesville Shard. Jelly, pizza fingers, crisps and ice cream. A whole lot of bunting. Our blog is five years old today and we’re awaiting the arrival in his much-loved Daimler DS420 of our patron and sugar-daddy, Sir Basil Batesville-Caskett Bt, CDM, […]
Tea with Daisy
In which our guest blogger Richard Rawlinson is compelled to account for a socially questionable hobby I googled your name recently and found you on some funeral blog site. What’s that all about? Ha ha, oh yeah, I know the guy who runs it. Just help him out every once in a while. I think you’re […]
#Bomo2013 – 7 & 8 September
It’ll be the third time we’ve done it, and it will have its third working title: Good Funeral Awards. It keeps on getting bigger and it keeps on changing its shape. We hope that this year will be better than ever. We’ve tried to keep prices as low as possible. Do come. We’ve published a […]
Feasting on brains
Weekends? Ha! We don’t believe in them here at the GFG-Batesville Shard. Probably you don’t, either. Because, like you, I know that the number one regret of the dying is: I wish I had worked harder. So on Sunday, noticing my bank manager had nodded off in a deckchair, I slipped my fiscal leash and […]
Desecration of Mum’s grave was the last straw
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Julie Bailey, founder of the Cure the NHS campaign group, which exposed the Mid Staffordshire scandal, has closed her café in Stafford after “political activists” desecrated her mother’s grave. “I am having to leave my home, my livelihood and my friends because a few misinformed local political activists have fuelled a hate […]
Dying what comes naturally
On Thursday the GFG donated an entire day to the Natural Death Centre — an act of generosity which has earned us the highest self-praise. We agreed to deliver People’s Awards winners’ certificates to those owners and managers of natural burial grounds upon whom the People had bestowed them. As our 54-seater luxury executive coach […]
You tried
One for you celebrants. In a deceptively ‘unclever’ eulogy for James Gandolfini, David Chase, creator and head writer of the Sopranos, offered this thought about the subordinate value of coherence in speechmaking: I remember how you [Gandolfini] did speeches. I saw you do a lot of them at awards shows and stuff, and invariably you […]
‘Everyone has a plan til they get punched in the mouth.’ – Mike Tyson
Of all the products dreamt up in the secret, black and midnight minds of financial services sorcerers, the pay-now-die-later funeral plan must rank as one of the rankest. It stinks. It’s idiotic. A funeral plan purports to benefit consumers by enabling them to buy tomorrow’s funeral at today’s prices (or thereabouts). But it wasn’t invented […]
It’s all good at Clandon Wood
Friday and Saturday 21 and 22 June marked the opening of Clandon Wood natural burial ground in the Surrey Hills, south of Guildford. The moving spirit behind the venture is Simon Ferrar, a man whose meticulous research has made him really quite famous in Funeralworld. There can’t be anywhere he didn’t visit, nor any person […]
Life stories don’t tell half the story
For the living there is much pleasure to be derived from surveying a person’s life when the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and their work is done. Dead, in other words. Works in progress – biographies of the living – just don’t cut it. Death focuses the mind on […]
