Here at GFG HQ we are in turmoil. Our computer crashed yesterday and, to cut a long story short, some hands were lost and we have a new operating system to get used to.
Worst of everything, I have lost my entire archive of emails and e-addresses. So if you’ve contacted me recently, and haven’t heard, please re-send.
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Peace of mind may take a little longer.
Thank you.
Very nice piece in the Washington Post by Tracy Grant:
Closets are odd creatures … In starter homes, newlywed husbands tease their brides that all their clothes will never fit in that closet. When the homebuyers are upscale, the closets can boast more square footage than some Manhattan apartments.
But talk to any adult child who has packed up a parent’s closet after a move to an assisted living facility or a death, and you know why these small, painfully intimate spaces are the stuff of metaphor. Closets, like our lives, can be messy.
For almost exactly three years after my husband died, I left our closet untouched. There were a host of easy rationalizations. I didn’t need the space. His clothes weren’t bothering me; why should they bother anyone else? There were also loftier justifications. The week after he died, a dear friend offered to come over and help me go through the closet. It seemed as ludicrous to me as when the funeral director suggested that he take Bill’s glasses and donate them to the Lion’s Club. “But he needs his things,” I wanted to scream.
I would come to refer to this as my Joan Didion moment. As she recounts in her memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking,” she refused to give husband John Gregory Dunne’s loafers away because if he came back, he would need his shoes.
Read the rest of it here.
PS Does anyone know how to change font and font colour in WordPress? Do tell me, please!
Thanks to the supernatural genius of Ian ‘Harry’ Harris (no, he’s not a gangster, he’s a web wizard) at Carron Media, this blog has, by dint of main force, gentle coaxing and the application of recondite algorithms, been migrated from Blogger, which is pulling the plug on it, to WordPress, which has pronounced itself humbled, deeply sensible of the honour, the usual sycophantic, highly merited claptrap.
Bulletins on all matters funereal will begin to pour forth from tomorrow.
In the meantime, need a web-whisperer? Harry’s yer man. Lovely guy. One in a million.
Here’s a nice biz opp for someone in the UK: a jobs review site.
Wossat? It’s a site where people leave anonymous reviews about the company they work for. Very useful for people thinking about working for that company.
Over in the US they have a few of these sites. One of them is JobVent. As you might expect, it’s those who hate their job who are more likely to leave a comment than those who love it. But if, as a prospective employee, you evaluate judiciously, I’d have thought that this site would give you a pretty good insight into what to expect. If you’re thinking about working for Paragon Application Systems, for example, you’ll be impressed by a string if stuff like this:
I have worked for Paragon for 10 years. This company has a family-type atmosphere, and we genuinely care about each other. The owners are generous with the benefits, as well as praise for all of the employees. The employees respect each other and strive to work together as a team.
But you might detect an odour of rodent in this:
Why are all the reviews on the same date? Same person perhaps?
I found JobVent yesterday and checked out Service Corporation International, possibly the most incompetent corporate undertaker the world has ever seen and almost certainly living proof that no corporate, however stealthy, however well camouflaged, can ever thrive in the funeral market. There was one review when I first looked. This morning, seven. Six are extremely negative. The positive one looks like a plant.
I wonder what reviews our own dear corporates would get? And I don’t mean that in a nasty, snidey sort of way. It’s easy to guess the negatives, nothing new there. It’s the positives I’d be interested to see.
Good to see that Malcolm McLaren will be going out in the anarchic style he did so much to popularise. We are all invited to observe a minute of mayhem at noon on Thursday.
More funeral arrangements here.
If you didn’t catch Rupert’s delightfully unbuttoned comment on yesterday’s post, have a look.
The interesting thing about the death deniers is that they don’t just put their hands over their ears and count noisily to ten until you stop. Whether death is the Old Enemy or just a Disgusting Old Man, it certainly brings out the streetfighter in the citizenry.
Up in Morpeth the town council was recently asked if it would permit a humanist funeral to be held in a community centre. Councillor Derek Thompson had this to say on the matter:
“Funerals are not what the centres were intended for when they were established, they are to be used for community recreation and social and leisure events. Holding them would be an inappropriate use of these buildings and we have no duty to provide them for this reason, so I’m strongly against this. I would also be worried about the effect they could have on people turning up for the next event after the funeral, whether it’s a bridge club or a children’s party.”
Whether the applicant had been a paedophile ring or a witches’ coven, you wonder if it would have elicited greater disapprobation.
Read the sorry story here.
Nice crazy story from the US, where the townspeople of Tracy City, TN, have just thrown out their mayor by electing a dead one instead. What an admirably creative protest vote.
Once the principal place of worship for Portlanders, who trekked here from earliest times from all parts of the island, St Andrew’s church was severely damaged by a landslip in 1675, but only finally abandoned in the mid-eighteenth century. In its ruined graveyard some of the headstones and monuments bear the skull-and-crossbones motif, a customary memento mori. Portlanders do not see them in this way. So far as they are concerned, these are the graves of pirates. They call this Pirates’ Graveyard and, in their genially pig-headed way, will hear of no other interpretation.
This blog is on holiday in its seaside cottage on the Isle of Portland. This little island, just four miles long and two wide, is where some of the world’s best limestone has been quarried. Find out what it’s built here.
