The Undertaking
The Undertaking is a documentary about Lynch and Sons, the funeral home in Milford, Michigan, which is also home to Thomas Lynch, the man whose writings and poetry have greatly influenced the thinking of so many of us in the UK. It’s a marvellous piece of work. Watch it in its entirety, free, here.
Priceless
There’s an interesting letter in this month’s Funeral Service Times from a funeral director, Brian Howard. Actually, it’s more of a suicide note, but we’ll come to that. He’s fed up with people ordering funerals they can’t pay for, or for which their dead people did not make any provision. “In our experience,” he says, […]
Bad moon rising?
An interesting thing about undertaking is that you don’t have to come at it from a position of actually being an undertaker. Does that make no sense? Let me explain. I know how undertakers feel. I am a writer. It is very difficult to come at writing from the position of being a writer. My […]
You were the future, once…
Interesting piece in this month’s Funeral Service Journal (FSJ), the undertakers’ trade mag, by Howard Hogson. Howard Hodgson? He was the young turk who bought his dad’s ailing funeral home in Birmingham for £14,00 in 1975 and embarked on an acquisition spree which had landed him 546 branches by 1991, at which time he pocketed […]
The mind is its own place
The Guardian ran a short piece on Saturday about those who work in the death industry. One of the themes was humour as a coping mechanism. One of the interviewees was Andrew Leverton of Leverton’s, by appointment undertaker to HRH the Queen. Asked if he found aspects of his work darkly funny he replied, “I […]
Gentilesse
The BBC has got a poetry season running. They’ve been dusting off dead rhymers from ages past and pushing them out in front of the cameras. But they’ve left the memory of Geoffrey Chaucer undisturbed and unsung, for all that he was the first poet to be buried in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. When I […]
Smiling damned villains
Did you read about that undertaker in Middlesbrough? The one who stole the keys from a rival undertaker’s hearse as it sat obedient and empty outside the Salvation Army citadel? It had to be hotwired to get it to the cemetery. It had to be seen to be believed. The story has been reported around […]
The bigger they come the harder they fall
Here’s a problem for a species of mathematician: Exactly how big can a funeral directing enterprise get before it topples into incompetence and scandal? The same law of economics would, you think, apply to funeral directing as to, say, cars: expansion creates economies of scale and efficiencies of production which make your product both competitive […]
Sex and death
Today’s papers have enjoyed this story—the ones you’d expect, the funloving Sun and the _____________ (supply your own adjective) Daily Mail. It’s a story which emanates, so it seems, from the Wales News Service, whose website offers this enticement: “Have you been betrayed by your man? Or did you get revenge on your love rat? […]
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 […]
