Conspicuous combustion
No new technology devised for the improved disposal of dead bodies has managed to achieve both efficiency and spectacle. There’s a perfectly good reason for this: the brains behind cremation and cryomation and resomation never reckoned spectacle to be a selling point. After all, funerals in the UK are private events, most of them. When […]
Earth, wind and pyre
The be-wigged hair-splitters are having a sprightly time of it in the Appeal Court, where Davender Ghai is demanding the right to be burned, when he’s dead, on an open air funeral pyre. This is a matter of concern not just to those Hindus who want what Baba Ghai wants, but to anyone who […]
Finding Valhalla
A friend writes. She is to be interviewed for the talking wireless. They’re going to want her take on Viking funerals. What, she wonders, are my views on Viking funerals? Can you, I wonder, help? Interesting territory. We think of the classic Viking funeral as a blazing longship, bearing the corpse of a chieftain, […]
Open air cremation – it’s for all of us
Following my post of yesterday, I have had the following response from Andrew Singh Bogan: Dear Charles, Thank you for your email; I read the blog with interest and have taken time out of my hectic schedule to submit this response. The EHRC website (http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/) advises that their “…job is to promote equality and human […]
Open air cremation – latest news of the appeal
On 19 and 20 January 2010 the Court of Appeal will hear the appeal of Davender Kumar Ghai against the prohibition of open air cremation upheld by the High Court in May 2009. It was a case made notorious by the intervention of Justice Secretary Jack Straw, who asserted that indigenous Britishers would be “upset […]
This is a burning issue. Please act now!
http://www.lifeandlove.tv/video.cfm/cid/2003/vid/1190/preview/true The video above (I’m sorry, I can’t embed it) shows, or purports to show, an open-air cremation in Colorado. I am indebted to m’learned friend, the humane, wise and scholarly Pat McNally, for putting me onto it. It is the subject of his latest blog post. If you are not a regular reader of […]
Forward backwards!
My good friend the embalmer is not noted for halfway utterance, nor for half-tones in her vocabulary. She calls a spade a spade and hits you with it if she thinks you’re wrong, thwang thwang. She’s never less than invigorating. One of the themes she warms to hotliest is that of the present reinventing the […]
Blazing row
“The Hindus of Britain have never asked for anything,” says Mr Gai of the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society “but we’re not asking for much, just to cremate our loved ones in the way our religion says it must be done.” The issue of open-air cremation is hotting up as Newcastle-based Mr Gai prepares to go the […]
