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That the natural burial movement began in the UK may be a source of pride if patriotism is your thing. That there are now more than 200 natural burial grounds in the UK compared with, say, around 20 in the USA, may serve to augment that pride. But if you could see some of the burial grounds in the UK that badge themselves as natural and where, you might conclude, the dead look as if they have been fly-tipped, your pride might shrink sharply. It might desert you entirely if you discovered that this nascent movement has already spawned two villains who have had to flee the country. Having considered the range of natural burial grounds, their locations, their avowed environmental purpose and their actual practices, you might find it very difficult to answer the simple question, What is natural burial?

The answer to that and a thousand other questions is answered in a timely new book, A Guide to Natural Burial. Because it is written by Ken West, the man who started it all, the only person employed in Bereavement Services ever to be awarded an OBE, it will do more than merely command respect.

Ken is much more moderate than me in his choice of vocabulary (except perhaps where he mentions Margaret Thatcher). Wherever his own feelings and preferences may lie in such matters as memorialisation, he is keen that natural burial should accommodate as many different tastes as possible so long as they can be accommodated in an environmentally principled way: “I accept that natural burial can be developed under different guises.” Though he sometimes records cases of unprincipled or simply incoherent practice, he does not dwell on them nor does he grow polemical. He prefers instead to accentuate the positive, look ahead and give natural buriers the knowledge and tools to get it right in the future; to do it well and thrive.

This is an important book because no one else is as well qualified to have written it. Ken has been burying people since he was a lad just out of school in 1961. As a lifelong local authority employee he has close on fifty years’ hands-on experience to draw on. As a balancer of budgets, he has thought long and hard about financial sustainability. As an environmentalist, he has thought urgently about ecological sustainability. He is the pioneer, the man who, against the odds, made it happen. He has mud on his boots, knowledge in his head and passion in his heart. He has everything to teach us.

For those who own and run natural burial grounds, this book will be the bible for years to come. Writing it must have been a herculean task. It covers absolutely everything: understanding the market, habitat creation, mowing, infrastructure, memorialisation, management, financial issues, planning issues, gravedigging and marketing. Each topic is dealt with in minutest detail. Ken covers all the nitty-gritty practicalities. In the hands of a natural burial ground owner, this book will become as thumbed and dogeared as any cook’s favourite recipe book.

Although much of what Ken writes about may be reckoned dry, I found even the driest parts compellingly interesting. The section on mowing is strangely unputdownable and Ken has a way of livening things up with personal reflections: “The English striped lawn has become a modern day icon representing the sheer absurdity of our relationship with nature.” The how-to section on gravedigging is similarly enthralling. I was especially pleased to read his exhortation to potential natural burial ground operators to “select a site containing fertile soil and to inter as shallow as possible … work to 24” (61 cm) depth of soil over the coffin.” I was interested to learn that he assumes that re-use of graves will have been legalised within 75 years.

He concludes by revisiting a cause dear to his heart, what he calls an “integrated funeral service,” a version of a scheme he initiated at Carlisle whereby the local authority contracted with a local funeral director to provide a lowest-possible-cost funeral. It came apart when the contracted funeral director subverted the spirit of the arrangement by upselling coffins. In this evolved version, Ken suggests that natural burial grounds might act also as funeral directors: “With minimal staff, no need for a hearse … reduced road travel and dual use of site staff and their offices, overheads are kept to a minimum.” This would ensure that “the total funeral income is retained by the natural burial site, and not shared with a conventional funeral director.” This is unlikely to endear him to the Dismal Trade, but it shows you that he has written this book as much with his head as with his heart. Ken has a strong sense of social responsibility.

This is a dense work which I defy to you to devour in a single sitting. And it fulfils its purpose: to inform anyone wanting to understand the funeral market; anyone wanting to understand the commercial, environmental and social impact of funerals; and those wanting to take control of their own funeral arrangements.

At an economics-driven £39.50 it’s by no means a low-cost option. Except that it’s not an option. It’s the only one there is.

I’ve been messing up my hyperlinks for the last ten days or so. I’ve mended them, now, so if there’s anything you want to follow up, go back and have another go. If there’s anything I’ve left unmended, do let me know: charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk.

Apologies — and thank you!

We’ve been busy moving house on our beloved Isle of Portland, from my old bachelor pad to something a little bigger, and someday we shall retire there. The new place is everything a Portland house ought to be: twenty-four inch thick walls which render neighbours inaudible, and a handsome garden enclosed by limestone walls. We are very pleased.

We are also unusually conscious of its former occupant, Florrie Ansell. She was 98 when she died in March. Except for the last two years of her life, which she spent in a care home, she had lived there since she was born. It was her father’s house before her. When Florrie married Alec, she moved him in. When her father died in 1955 the first thing she and Alec did was install electric light, something her father had always taken against.

We are finding out more and more about Florrie. She taught piano on a little upright in the back room. If a pupil played especially well he or she was allowed upstairs to sit at the grand and talk to the cats. Florrie was always beautifully turned out, and she looked after her house beautifully, too. It’s gone a bit downhill lately and the roof is leaking a bit, but her pride in its appearance is plain to see. Her niece has asked us to hurry up and paint the front door and the window frames: “She would be turning in her grave to see them as they are now.” In truth, they’re not bad – but we have made them a priority.

Is Florrie’s spirit palpable? Not as a disembodied presence, not to us. But the house has a perceptible serenity, and we feel a strong responsibility to be respectful of Florrie and the feelings of all her friends in what we do to it. So the art deco fireplaces will stay, and the stained glass panel of the little Dutch boy in the hall door, together with the art deco bath, the sort of bath Bertie Wooster would have splashed about in.

Usually it’s only aristocratic piles that commemorate their former occupants. We know we have a duty to commemorate Florrie. It’s a duty we accept as a privilege.

Have you read Eulogy magazine? A number of you have asked me, and you have probably been expecting me to cough up a pov. But at more than £3 a throw it is way beyond my stayin’alive budget.

Yet we ought to know about it, need to know about it. Would you like to review it for readers of this blog? Please, please do!

Write something and send it to me: charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk

You’ve been following the Raoul Moat aftermath? The parody-of-Diana shrine, the mawkish and the up-yours tributes, the incredulous condemnations by a clearly baffled political class?

Revulsion? Dark merriment? Take your pick. This is a very British, brutish affair. If you’ve a moment, the St Raoul site on Facebook is worth a gander and a ponder.

The perpetrator of this blog is unwell. The vast outpouring will recommence on his recovery (DV).

If you are one of many who has incredulously endured a funeral conducted by a minister of religion for a dead person of known no faith, spare a thought for the people of Belgium, where the language feud (Dutch vs French) means that if you’re a French speaker in a Flemish suburb of Brussels, your dead person’s funeral will be incomprehensible.

This is from the Wall Street Journal:

French-speaking Sylvia Boigelot is still upset that in 2006, her father’s funeral, in the northern suburb of Vilvoorde, was in Dutch, in accordance with a local ordinance that all church services be in the language. “There were people who had known him all his life who couldn’t understand a word,” she says. “And it happened with my grandmother, too.”

Read the entire story here.

My website has been, I don’t know, hosted, is it? by WordPress for the last month. Instead of Google Analytics to tell me who comes and what they come for, I now have WordPress stats. In some ways they aren’t so good. I can no longer see where in the world my visitors come from. My wife enjoyed that. “Ooh, look, you’ve got two people in Patagonia!”

But in all sorts of other ways my new stats are a huge improvement. They tell me so much more. Including stuff I want to hear. Visitor numbers are rising all the time. That a niche publication which bangs on and on remorselessly and humourlessly about death should attract just shy of 9,000 visitors a month looks good to me. Now that the Guide is out, that ought to climb away nicely.

My new stats also tell me what people look for. Coffins top the list by a long way. What do you make of that? They are followed by best funeral directors, then What To Do With Ashes, then Create The Ceremony, then hearses, then Funeralcare bloopers. Green funerals, intriguingly, come way down. Perhaps people who want a green funeral are more inclined to go straight to the excellent Natural Death Centre website?

A good many folk trawl through the blog archive. Some posts are unaccountably and enduringly popular. Every day several people find Who cares? and Desert flowers.

I can also see who clicks through to other websites from mine. Coffins again take the lead. Top of the list there is Greenfield Creations, the coffin makers who supply to the public at remarkably fair prices. Next, to my delight, comes Bellacouche, the shroud maker. I do hope Yuli’s sold one or two on the strength. Phoenix Diamonds, the people who make ashes into diamonds, get a lot of interest. So does William Warren, the man who designed a coffin that can be used as bookshelves until you need it (pictured above). Send him your measurements and he’ll send you the spec. Free. Lovely man.

(Actually, it now occurs to me, I have amassed market information that would be of enormous value to lots of people in the Dismal Trade, whom I now expect to beat a path to my door waggling their wads. Go away! )

I also get a useful list of search terms people have used. I can test them and see what page of Google the GFG comes up on. And here I can report that, if you’re skint like what I am and doing it all on a frayed shoestring, you can, by dint of sheer hard blogging, get yourself right up there. It’s the most gratifying thing my stats have told me. Floreat meritocracy and stubborn self-belief!

The Moonies, followers of that well-known oxymoron Sun Moon, want to create a one-acre natural burial ground in the village of Stanton Fitzwarren, near Swindon.  It’s not just for Moonies; the villagers are welcome, too.

The villagers aren’t happy, of course. The English are not natural-born embracers of change (or even of each other); they are more given to stopping things than making things happen. Count all the campaigns you are aware of. I bet they’re all to stop buy cialis using paypal something.

With what do the villagers take issue, do you suppose? The exotic beliefs and alleged cult practices of the Moonies, of whom Sun Moon himself said: “Looking at the Moonies from the normal, common-sense point of view, we certainly appear to be a bunch of crazy people!”?

No. Nothing so high-octane. In the words of parish councillor Liz Bannister: “It’s because of the parking more than anything.”

How English is that!

Read the story here.

The Good Funeral Guide is published today! Available from all good bookshops, one or two very bad ones and all the usual online suspects.