Funerals, who needs em?
When England first played Scotland, on 30 November 1872, both teams employed formations that would raise eyebrows today. Scotland went for a cautious 2-2-6 while England employed a more swashbuckling 1-1-8. The game was all kick-and-rush in those days. Kick-and-rush. It’s how businesses, anxious to futureproof themselves, respond to prophecy. Some bright spark peers into […]
Seen and heard: should young children attend funerals?
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Some say death is too sanitised these days, with few people dying at home where all the family can say goodbye, and with professionals now taking over the duties of preparing the body for the funeral. Has this social development made us over-protective of children, just as they’re now sometimes even shielded from […]
Santa’s final ride
We are pleased to host a series of posts, in monthly instalments, recounting the adventures of Vintage Lorry Funerals. Here’s the second. Vintage Lorry Funerals took Santa Claus on his final journey in Bristol who was buried in his red uniform and black boots. It wasn’t Santa Claus, but a man who had played him in […]
Location, location, location
Guest post by author and journalist Ann Treneman. Over the past four years, I have spent almost all my spare time in cemeteries for my new book ‘Finding the Plot: 100 Graves to Visit Before You Die‘. One of the key things that I have discovered is that having the right funeral is all about planning. There’s […]
Telling the essential apart from the accessory
Perhaps what we need just now is a bout of reactionaryism and a reappraisal of where funerals seem to be going in the light of where they have come from. We don’t have an intellectual hard-hitter over here like undertaker-poet Thomas Lynch, but what he says about American “monogrammed, one-off, highly personalised funerals” is broadly […]
It’s all in the livery
We are pleased to host a series of posts, in monthly instalments, recounting the adventures of Vintage Lorry Funerals. Here’s the first. Vintage Lorry Funerals 1950 Leyland Beaver is sometimes chosen to carry the Deceased solely because of its colour. The lorry was used in a Leeds Traveller’s Funeral for no other reason than its livery […]
A C of E funeral
To Salisbury and the funeral of the mother of two friends. The venue is the cathedral, no less. We get there in good time, but not good enough: the place is almost full and we forage for a seat at the back. Who’s the celeb who died, you ask. No one you’ve heard of. Andrea […]
Fifty years since JFK’s assassination
Posted by Richard Rawlinson We’re approaching the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, at 12.30pm on Friday, 22 November 1963. In the wake of a media deluge, here’s a video of the state funeral on Monday, 25 November. Preparations were speedy. The president’s body was brought back to Washington and, after 24 hours […]
An essay in melancholy
Last week I passed an empty hearse going the other way. It set me musing. Freed from its solemn duties, no longer slowed by a weighty coffin and all the gravitas attendant upon such a thing, emptied of flowers and no longer the misty-eyed focus of profoundly sad people, it had about it none of […]
In the borderlands
Posted by Jenny Uzzell There is a very useful word frequently used by anthropologists and students of religion and mythology to describe something that is neither one thing nor the other; something that is ‘in between’. The word is ‘liminal’. Classic examples of things that are ‘liminal’ are marshes or other places at the water’s edge, […]
