The GFG Awards, 7 September 2012
The GFG Awards will be the first-ever industry awards ceremony. We have received 149 nominations for 14 categories, so it’s a very strong field. More details any time soon. First, though, our thanks to Steve Ancrum and the brilliant team at Sunset Coffins, who are donating funeral Oscars, like the one above, each of which […]
What complaining through the Funeral Arbitration Scheme feels like
From: Beverley Webb Sent: 15 August 2012 23:03 To: Weymouth Abbotsbury Rd (TCF) Subject: Gloria Roper Importance: High Dear Ms Allen We are writing to request you send us a copy of the estimate of costs of our late mother’s funeral and copies of the agreement we signed in your office in Weymouth on December 8th 2011, you can email […]
Body or ashes at the funeral?
Posted by Richard Rawlinson As a blogger, I may seem as impervious to the ways of secular funerals as a civil celebrant is to the customs of Catholicism. But as a reader, I’ve mulled over ideas presented here to find they’ve struck a chord. While unprejudiced readers will already realise I value choice, whether religious or […]
Wow, Betty!
From the Carlisle News and Star: A tea dance at The Shepherds Inn, in Montgomery Way, Carlisle, will replace the traditional wake, after the 83-year-old’s funeral at Carlisle Crematorium. Elizabeth Ellen Brown, known as Betty to her many friends, colleagues and family members, had planned her funeral a week before she died. Her death at […]
News roundup
Funeralworld tends to be a very quiet, even dull, place — well, in Britain it is. And perhaps we should be grateful for that. If we glance over at our friends in the US we find much more goes on. In the last few days… A hearse driver died while taking a body to a […]
Stat of the day: cost of living
22 per cent of all health spending goes to people in their last year of life.
This is for everyone
Posted by Belinda Forbes, celebrant. For some of the participants, when an event as life-changing as the Olympics finishes, it is like a bereavement. So it was appropriate that at the Closing Ceremony on Sunday evening Eric Idle performed Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. This is a song which I have been asked to […]
Switched off but still sparking
Today’s theme is ashes, by the way. In her brilliant book Making an Exit, which not nearly enough of you have read, the author, Sarah Murray, plans her own dispersal. First, she wants to be resomated and reduced to the pure white ‘ash’ characteristic of the process. What next? Scattering, of course, for cremation is, and […]
Funeral director sponsors Olympian
From the Daily Mail: Chris Mears had a five per cent chance. Of living, that is. Nothing to do with diving. A five per cent chance of surviving an emergency operation on a ruptured spleen in a training hospital in Sydney. Impressive then that on Tuesday night, three years on, the 19-year-old was competing in […]
The great leveller
Lord Peter Ralfe Harrington Evans-Freke, 11th Baron of Carbery, was laid to rest yesterday in the family mausoleum in the chapel of Castlefreke beside his wife, Lady Joyzelle Carbery. There was a full Tridentine sung Latin mass at Rathbarry Church. Monks from Glenstal Abbey and Downside Abbey officiated.
