Author: Charles

To our critics

28 February 2013
Charles
21 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

Dear Ian and Frank, 

It was good to see you commenting once more on the blog. It shows that people of all shades of opinion read it, not just a clique. 

I hope you appreciate the way I allow you to say whatever you like, however abusive (so long as it isn’t also libellous).   

Do you ever wonder why I don’t just bin your more abusive comments as soon as they appear? After all, they are often personal, they can be pretty hurtful, they are usually very negative and they contribute nothing to the debate. 

I let you comment because I believe in free speech and because I am interested in what you have to say. I know that you speak for many people in the industry. 

I hope you have some respect for the way in which I expose everything I say to comment. This is because I don’t think I am always right, and because I like to be put right where I have got it wrong. I hope you’ll agree that it takes guts and open-mindedness to do that. 

I hope you respect the way that I do not hide my identity or shelter my contact details. I take personal responsibility for everything I say, and I make myself vulnerable by doing so.   

Which is more than I can say for you. 

The funeral industry is a service industry. Service users have a right to talk about it. So I want to suggest to you that your aggressive defence of the industry you clearly love is unhelpful and mistaken. You make it look small-minded and nasty. 

So come on. Step up. Let’s have reasoned debate and a constructive dialogue. Stop being so angry. 

We all want what’s best. 

With best wishes, 

Charles

Why doctors say no

27 February 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: End-of-life issues

Physicians see and treat patients who have undergone CPR. Those patients are usually paralyzed, swollen with fluid, and unconscious. Upon witnessing that, physicians might buy cialis online forum wonder what the differences are between “living” and “existing”.

This could explain why their end-of-life care preferences differ from that of the general public.

Source

Philosophical brain teaser

27 February 2013
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Some readers might recall Roal Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected on TV. ‘William and Mary’ was a particularly beastly story about an academic having his brain and one eye transplanted from his body after death, and attached to an artificial heart so they both continue to function.

William can see and think but nothing more. He is a mind incapable of being a person. His widow, Mary, takes the brain home in its protective capsule, but instead of caring for it by giving it learned books to read, she promptly takes revenge by doing all the things that met with William’s disapproval when he could communicate – things like smoking and watching trash TV. He’s helpless and in hell.

As animals, our deaths are defined by the end of the vital processes that sustain our existence as human beings. As minds, our deaths are constituted by the irreversible extinction of the vital processes that sustain our existence as minds. But if persistence is determined by our retaining certain psychological features, then does the loss of those features constitute death?

Bright eyes

26 February 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: music

Posted by Vale

Remember Watership Down? The best selling childrens book about a band of rabbits?

Adams, the author, gives the warrens he writes about social structures and a strong lapin culture. There are even myths and legends. Even a rabbit version of the Grim Reaper himself who appears to rabbits as ‘the Black Rabbit of Inle’. Inle is Lapine for ‘moon’ or ‘darkness’.

The song – Bright Eyes – was written for the cartoon version of the book and is a lament for Hazel, leader of the band of rabbits, as he dies and goes to join the band of heroes who follow the rabbits’ trickster god El Ahrairah (Prince of a Thousand Enemies).

Eat your heart out Bambi.

Is it a kind of dream,
Floating out on the tide,
Following the river of death downstream?
Oh, is it a dream?

There’s a fog along the horizon,
A strange glow in the sky,
And nobody seems to know where you go,
And what does it mean?
Oh, is it a dream?

Bright eyes,
Burning like fire.
Bright eyes,
How can you close and fail?
How can the light that burned so brightly
Suddenly burn so pale?
Bright eyes.

Is it a kind of shadow,
Reaching into the night,
Wandering over the hills unseen,
Or is it a dream?

There’s a high wind in the trees,
A cold sound in the air,
And nobody ever knows when you go,
And where do you start,
Oh, into the dark.

Bright eyes,
burning like fire.
Bright eyes,
how can you close and fail?
How can the light that burned so brightly
Suddenly burn so pale?
Bright eyes.

Bright eyes,
burning like fire.
Bright eyes,
how can you close and fail?
How can the light that burned so brightly
Suddenly burn so pale?
Bright eyes.

Why doctors can’t talk about death

26 February 2013
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, Death; Good death, End-of-life issues

“Psychoanalysts believe that emotional trauma in human life is because man is not really a god and is something more than just an animal. He is a demi-god and being a demi-god is hard.  He can create and appreciate goodness, enjoy the wonder and awe of each day; teach, learn, and dream, but at the same time, he can see into the future and knows his fate.  His mind can conceive flying through the air, staying awake for days or living to be 10,000, but he is denied by the limitations of his flesh.  This results in life long stress and in order to cope man uses various psychological strategies, including repression and denial, to focus on each day and each moment and not go truly mad.

When someone becomes ill with a life threatening illness such as cancer, their ability to deny the animal part of their existence may collapse.  Suddenly they are less god than ailing beast. This can cause terrible anxiety, confusion and depression, as their personality is threatened by physical deterioration and critical coping mechanisms fail.  At these critical times, the support of a physician who understands the core balance of the human condition can be most valuable.

“However, it seems to me that doctors do not talk about death to their patients, not because they do not care, but because doctors do not know how to deal with the god, they only understand the animal.”

Source

Afore ye go

26 February 2013
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: End-of-life issues, memorialisation

We think you’ll agree with us that RecordMeNow.org is a Very Good Thing.

It’s downloadable software that enables you, using the little camera in your computer screen, to record your thoughts about your life, and other things besides, for your children, partner, family, you name it.

The creators especially had children in mind, because children can go through life with all sorts of unresolved questions about a dead parent — the sorts of questions which never go away and prevent them from living fully. One child said:

“Particularly after long illness followed by such family sadness, I had significant feelings of guilt about feeling happy in later life. Permission from him directly would have been really good.”

Another said:

“I felt that without my mum’s advice, we were somehow betraying her by accepting future relationships especially when dad found a future wife years later.”

Another said:

“I just want to see and hear her say she loves me, once more.”

So the RecordMeNow researchers interviewed more than 100 volunteers who had lost one or both parents before the age of 16:

They were asked a series of questions regarding their loss, their prior knowledge and their subsequent educational, social  and professional development. They were also asked what questions they wished they could have had answered about or by the parent who died. 

Using the RecordMeNow app, you work your way through these questions and create a DVD. 

RecordMeNow is a nonprofit founded by some incredibly nice, bright people. Do check it out. 

I Will Be Blessed — Ben Howard

25 February 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: funeral music, music
Oh my ghost came by
Said who do you love the most
Who you wanna call before you dieOh my ghost came by here
Said who do you love the most
Who you gonna sing to ‘fore you’re goneOh hey heaven is the place we know
Heaven is the arms that hold us
Long before we go
Oh hey, heaven is the place we know
Heaven is the arms that hold us
Long before we goOh my ghost came by here
Said who do you love the most
Who you gonna sing to ‘fore you go

Oh hey heaven is the place we know
Heaven is the arms that hold us
Long before we go
Oh hey, heaven is the place we know
Heaven is the arms that hold us
Long before we go

Oh if you’re there
When the world comes to gather me in
Oh if you’re there
I will be blessed
Oh if you’re there
When the world comes to gather me in
Oh if you’re there
I will be blessed
Oh if you’re there
When the world comes to gather me in
I hear you’re there
I will be blessed
I will be blessed

Oh if you’re there
When the world comes to gather me in
Oh if you’re there
I will be blessed
I will be blessed

A big thank you to Georgina Pugh for sending us this.

Unwanted man

25 February 2013
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: Richard Sage

Sage

 

There’s a leaflet circulating in Southend-on-Sea and environs advising the populace to have nothing to do with the Mary Mayer Funeral Home.

What, you ask, has Ms Mary Mayer done to deserve this? She would seem to be both blameless and admirable — an idealist, even:  

Our founder Mary Mayer, a nurse of long standing, felt that the funeral service profession had become an impersonal big business; large groups had formed buying up the traditional family funeral directors known for their personal care and trust by generations of families and turning them into large, money making giants concerned on profits and not families.

Go Mary!

We found this short biog at Duedil:

Mary Mayer is British and was born in 1954. Her first directorship was in 2012 with Mayer Funeral Home Ltd – she was 57 years old at the time. Mayer Funeral Home Ltd is her most recent non-secretarial directorship where she holds the position of “Nurse”. The company was established 2012.

Well, it seems that no one has ever seen Mary. What they have seen instead is the not inconsiderable bulk of a scamp called Richard Sage, a man who, an investigative journalist once observed to us, “would rather make a bent 99p than an honest pound.” The blog has covered some of Richard’s mischiefmaking here. 

When he did a runner from Burnley we put the Dispatches TV people onto his trail. They set an ex-News of the World hound to track him down but the old bugger had vanished. It’s a trick he’s picked up. 

We heard he’d resurfaced under this Mayer moniker shortly after he opened his doors, promising that this time he really had learned his lesson. He even gave himself a new name: Mark Kerbey. We set the ITV undercover people onto him, warning them that if he got a whiff of who they really were he’d be off into the ether like that. They rocked up at Ms Mayer’s establishment with hidden cameras and air of innocence — but Richard had whiffed them. They came empty away. 

We’d reckoned that exposure on prime time TV would be the most effective way of getting rid of him once and for all — more effective than writing about him on this blog. It was not to be. So we rang the local paper and urged them to get onto the story in the public interest. We chatted to influential people in the area and agreed to keep quiet for the time being while steps were taken. 

Well, the cat’s out of the bag now. Whoever is putting that leaflet about is doing good work. 

Postscript: Ben Anderson, the man behind the ITV exposé of malpractice at Gillman’s, is on Panorama on Thursday reporting from Helmand. 

 

 

The Dabbler

25 February 2013
Charles
37 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

Extract from the blurb for The Fixer, BBC2, Tuesday 26 Feb, 8pm-9pm: 

David Holmes runs a family business that’s one of the few industries to buck the current economic trend. Yet Holmes and Sons in Fleet, Hampshire, is almost dead and buried. If you haven’t guessed, they’re funeral directors. David’s young sons Olly and Toby are bored to death; David’s a soft touch (his nickname is Giveaway Dave), while colleague Sheena is sulkily and stubbornly resistant to change.

We give you advance notice of this with a heavy heart. The GFG gave hours of unpaid advice to the makers of the programme. We parted company when they rejected that advice and went trotting gaily down the well-worn path of formulaic tellytosh. The next sentence of the blurb tells you precisely why: 

The meeting with a wedding planner to get ideas how to organise an event is nearly the final nail in the coffin for [Sheena].

As it was for us. We had gone out of our way to explain that a funeral business is like no other; that generic solutions don’t apply; that a cosmetic makeover wouldn’t do the trick; you can’t turn a funeral into a good funeral by accessorising it with gewgaws. 

What we should have done next was withdraw permission for any footage of us to be shown. We didn’t — because we didn’t think it would be used. That was a very grave mistake and it calls for an apology. We had agreed a before-and-after format whereby we identified a problem… and then returned to rejoice in how wonderfully well it had been rectified. We got as far as filming the ‘before’ stuff and, regrettably, it looks as if it may be shown alone, wholly unbalanced by the praise and congratulation we looked forward to heaping on David and his crew at the end. 

Sorry Toby, sorry Olly. Our intention was good. 

Let us now praise famous underachievers

22 February 2013
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: obituary; epitaph

A charmingly unsparing obituary in yesterday’s Times(£) celebrated the life and times of rock musician Kevin Ayers.  Very old readers of this blog may remember him. 

A richly gifted singer and songwriter, Kevin Ayers made some wonderfully quixotic and engaging pop music, full of wit, warmth and whimsy. He was a founder member of Soft Machine, one of the seminal groups of the 1960s “underground”. Elton John appeared on his albums and both Mike Oldfield and the future Police guitarist Andy Summers played with him. He was also briefly a member of an “alternative supergroup” with Brian Eno, John Cale and Nico.

But while many of those he worked with went on to become platinum-sellers, Ayers — whose talent was described by John Peel as “so acute you could perform major eye surgery with it” — took a conscious decision to remain a cult figure, making records blessed with a freewheeling spirit and languid charm that operated blithely outside the fads and fashions of the music industry.

On several occasions in his career stardom appeared to beckon, but Ayers invariably found a way to thwart its arrival. Indeed, he was inordinately proud of the fact that he lacked the outsize ego and relentless ambition of the average rock’n’roll celebrity. Asked about his lack of drive when he released a comeback album in 2007, he replied: “I lost it years ago. But, in a way, I don’t think I’ve ever had it.”

He preferred a studied decadence and the indolent life of a bon viveur to the dedicated pursuit of fame and fortune, and the word louche might have been invented to describe him. It was once said that he wrote three kinds of songs: while drinking, while drunk and while hungover.