Endgame
Interesting, isn’t it, how myopically self-absorbed people become when glancing forward to their demise. “Stick me in a binbag and put me out with the rubbish,” they say, men mostly. It’s right up there now in the top ten death clichés alongside “He’s gone to a better place,” “It’s only a shell,” and “She will […]
funeralcomparison.co.uk
A reader has written to me to draw my attention to funeralcomparison.co.uk. Is it, he asks, a scam? I’d not come across it before. If you go to the site you’ll find that it enables you to, in their words, “find the exact funeral requirements you require in-line with your budget. You can search from over […]
Head-in-noose funeral plans
There was a good and much-needed hatchet job on whole-life insurance in the Daily Mail last month: Funeral plans aggressively advertised to older people – often during daytime TV ads – have been exposed as a raw deal. More than 4.5 million people hold these plans — otherwise known as whole of life policies — which pay out […]
The labourer is worthy his/her hire
While I was well out of it last week on my guano-spattered rock set in a silver sea, the militant wing of this blog’s readership did a number on Lovingly Managed. It seems to have ended in either mutual exasperation or bewilderment. Probably a bit of both. Heavy breathing, for sure. Perhaps the greatest dialectical […]
It’s what she would have wanted
Here’s a new poem by Wendy Cope published in the current Spectator. I hope she’ll forgive the flagrant breach of copyright and see this instead as a promo. Its sentiments are very contemporary. My Funeral I hope I can trust you, friends, not to use our relationship As an excuse for an unsolicited ego-trip. I […]
Making the best of old age
On a slow news day, I quite enjoyed this piece by Jane Miller in my favourite newspaper: Many of us have been possessed at times by thoughts that the life we are living is not the real one, but some botched job we somehow fell into, provisionally as it were, fine for the time being, […]
Robbing the dead while they’re still alive
Consumers are best served by people whose interests are their interests – people who want what their customers want. Ethics-driven natural burial ground operators are a good example. This is an equation, so it works the other way around. There’s not much understanding of this in the funeral industry. There are shining exceptions, but their […]
Some conflict of interest, surely?
Michael Parkinson HM Government Dignity Ambassador for old people, and… …the face behind Sun Life funeral plans, which are… …Co-operative funeral plans. Tut tut.
Costing the dead
I think we all buy into the notion that capitalism is a species of altruism, only more caring. So it comes as no surprise to discover that Sun Life Direct, vendor of financial services to the over 50s, cares like mad about us—all of us, not just on-the-way-out over 50s. They’ve just commissioned research from […]
Jonathan Taylor’s funeral preferences
Jonathan Taylor is an independent funeral celebrant in Totnes, and an occasional funeral arranger and conductor for green fuse. That’s not all he is, of course. There’s a lot more to Jonathan. He’s got a literary side, for example, and refers to one of his short stories in what follows. Everyone’s funeral wishes are different. […]
