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This blog is going to the seaside for a week in the firm conviction that there is more to life than death. It will spend some time hanging out with its embalmer friend, but its small talk is unlikely to be corpsecentric. No, it will be walking the windswept clifftops, eating crab sandwiches at Portland Bill and enjoying bitter beer at The George, a pub which is still a pub. It is unlikely to give expression to thanatological utterance.

Before I go, three things:

First: Note to all florists: ‘Granddad’ has three ‘d’s, a double followed by a single. You’re all missing out a ‘d’ at the moment and losing good revenue as a result.

Second: I apologise for getting under the skin of so many people with my last post about Funeralcare. Everyone professionally involved with funerals lives in beyond-mortal terror of screwing up. We know that if it can happen it will and, therefore, at some time, we will. This is a matter of deep neurosis. I touched a raw nerve. Only this morning it only took me just half a mile to convince myself that I was driving to the wrong crematorium. I wasn’t — but you know how it goes.

What am I doing, tweaking Funeralcare’s tail like this? It all started with my first post about them, and their subsequent non-response. Read what the latest TUC Congress said about them here. I have to confess that I hate a good fight, it’s not what I do. But you may forgive me for feeling narked. The GMB union has promised me a response, and I’ll post that when it comes in.

Third: The rejection of a mainstream religious funeral by those who are not religious, or have their own, personal spiritual beliefs, has made it necessary for them to re-invent the funeral. And the central problem facing those who want to re-invent funerals is this: if the funeral cannot look forwards and contemplate the person who has died enjoying a blissfest in eternity, then what on earth can it do? People who have not adopted or evolved a belief system which explains death have to make sense of it their own way, sometimes from scratch.

I’ve just read a very well-written and thoughtful blog post on the state of the modern funeral. It will strike a chord with many of you. Here’s an extract:

We stopped talking about death, judgment, heaven, and hell. We have become Egyptian in our attitude towards death and the afterlife, thinking our deceased’s coffin needs to be filled with the things they enjoyed in this life: their favorite cigarettes, romance novels, transistor radio, etc. We allow the white funeral pall, which recalls baptismal dignity, to be replaced by things like a sport jersey or some other keepsake.

He is a priest. He has no doubt what a funeral is for. He believes that the doctrine and decorum of a religious funeral breathe a still, small voice of calm and certainty upon disorderly feelings of grief and loss. Here’s how he defines some modern attitudes:

[Mourners] don’t see any need (much less the necessity) to pray for the soul of a deceased person. Nor do they see their need (or the deceased’s need) for the Church’s funeral rites. This gets replaced by their own personal version of the same. In short, the funeral is about THEM, and their grief at the loss of the deceased.

Read the entire post here. It will nourish your thinking. I’m not telling you what I think.

For now, “all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying / And the flung spray and the blown spume and the sea gulls crying.”

Back with you all soon.

If there was a conference organiser of the year award, it would go to Julie Dunk – technical officer and conference manager of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management – and her partner, Blue. The reason, probably, why there is no such award is that Julie and Blue would win it every year.

Two days ago I dropped in on the ICCM conference. What a bundle of fun, you may ironically think – and to your surprise you’d be right. Any gathering of any branch of the death industry is as cheery as it has every right to be, and the cem-crem gang are no exception. Thank you for inviting me, Julie!

I went principally to listen to Sandy Sullivan talking about Resomation, the new alternative to cremation. Here’s a process which has been already been smothered in horror by the gutter press. They want to boil dead bodies, they say, then flush them down the drain. It’s not actually like that at all. And it rather overlooks the fact that cremation entails setting fire to dead bodies and flushing them up chimneys.

I missed Sandy. I nattered too long to the excellent Sandra Thomson, and couldn’t get into the lecture hall without creating a disturbance. Later, talking to crem managers, I discovered a lot of interest, and a desire to find out what precisely is in the liquid that is disposed of.

I wanted to meet memorialisers because that’s what I’m researching at the moment. I talked to the lovely people at the FG Marshall stand, and I had an engrossing chat with Jenny Gregson of BRAMM. I hadn’t known till she told me that the reasons people prefer shiny granite headstones are because the surface is easy-clean and they look forever new. Age shall not weary them nor the topple testers condemn.

So many of the good guys and gals of the funeral industry were there, including Wesley Music, who have done so much to improve the quality of funeral ceremonies, and are looking to instal multimedia display equipment in crems, a move which will be transformative. Paul Sinclair, the motorcycle funeral man, was there. He is a rare bundle of utter professionalism and great good humour. Time spent with Paul flies by.

Krysia from the indefatigable Institute of Civil Funerals was there, and it was she who taught me most. She objected in the most passionate terms to my unkindness in this blog to Adrian Pink of the British Institute of Funeral Directors. And while I am happy to contest Adrian’s professional judgement in supposing that a vast parade of hearses makes the funeral industry more approachable (Krysia disagrees with me implacably), I am not happy to think that I may have given him offence because I gather he is an extremely nice man who really is working as hard as he can, from the very best of motives, to make a difference.

Krysia’s word is good enough for me. Adrian, I apologise unreservedly. And I ask you again to talk to this blog and tell us exactly what you are striving to achieve. Here’s a very good opportunity for you to reach an audience of ordinary members of the public who would, I believe, be very interested to hear what you have to say.

Life teems with ticklish antitheses. In the midst of life we are in death: in the midst of death we are in life.

It’s a summer’s day which feels like late November. Rain is spitting; the leaves on the chestnut trees are browning. The funeral is over (I was the celebrant) and I pause to survey the scene before driving away – the huge, shagged-out cemetery, the sparse, tussocky vegetation, the numberless never-visited graves, the rows of mute headstones tied to stakes by the topple-testers, secured with bright yellow strapping. A mature burial ground like this makes visible the slow-mo obliteration of the unforgettable. Memory succumbs to amnesia.

In its forlorn heart, at the crematorium, the cherishing and commemoration of the dead goes on in the customary series of corteges and dispersals, the glossy black limousines, the laid out, cellophaned flowers, the little knots of mourners straggling back to their cars. There’s a certain sad majesty in this, a certain brave beauty. It’s a matter of taste.

The crematorium manager touches my elbow. “Your CD, mate.” It’s the CD of music we played at the funeral, which I had forgotten to pick up on my way out.

I put it on the passenger seat where it jostles another, the object of my next destination, another place suffering from municipal world-weariness, the register office, for I am to be married tomorrow. This other CD contains our wedding music. Important not to confuse them. As a springboard to connubial bliss, Michael Buble’s Lost arguably lacks upthrust.

Pop goes the corn. We’ve chosen Elgar’s Salut d’Amour. He’s a local boy, Elgar, a Wolves fan, and we like his little tune unapologetically. Oh, yes, of course, the registrar’s heard it before. We’ve chosen readings. I announce to the registrar: “This one’s an Apache blessing,” and she says “Oh yes Apache blessing” in a voice which disconcertingly reveals that we have selected the Henry Scott Holland of wedding readings.

On the day of days, James (a funeral director, as it happens, and a most remarkable one) reads the Apache blessing in his warm, shamanic voice. But, here’s the thing, unknown to us he has rehearsed everyone there in the last line and, when he reaches it, they all break into And may your days be good and long upon the earth. It’s a magical, wonderful moment. It breaks the mould of the one-size-fits-all ceremony and reclaims it for us – for everyone there.

We didn’t do the Rolls Royce and the fancy dress and the country house. We didn’t release doves or balloons or fireworks. We might have, but we didn’t. This was a simple wedding, a basic wedding, not an arm and a leg wedding.

But the ceremony had, we think, looking back, the two essential ingredients which doves and balloons fireworks and a country house and an Abba tribute band might have complemented and even vastly enhanced, but could never have substituted.

First, thanks to James’s masterstroke, it was shared. It belonged to us. All of us.

Second, just this: people came. They came from miles and miles away, some of them. They gave up their time, their Saturday, for us. None came without considerable inconvenience to themselves. Their showing up, their being there for us, their physical presence – that meant more to us than anything. It always will.

Never again will I not quite be able to make it to anybody’s funeral.

It’s a ticklish business, if you’ve never done it before, launching a website.

Launch? That’s a big verb. It’s not what it felt like: no tarantara, no wild whooping, no champagne-dripping prow.

Nothing like that at all. Simply, Harry, my webmeister, emailed late one uneventful evening. “You’re live,” he said. I inhaled a deep breath of expectation and held it (as you do).

Nothing happened.

That suited me very well because I was then struck down by the sort of virus that has all the malignant force of an inept practical joke. It makes the world whirl nauseously, then moderates and settles down to conducting a guerrilla campaign against your sense of balance. You feel drunk all the time, but shabbily so. It’s called labyrinthitis. I hope you never get it.

While my world spun and I lurched, the bathos continued. I had supposed that people would eventually spot me, stroll up and have a chat. I felt vulnerable, of course, though this is the point of the exercise: to encourage collaboration. But I know (you too) that there are jealous, angry egos in the world of death and funerals; and we know, too, that there are also bedlamites in cyberspace ready to squeak and gibber at us in foam-flecked lower case in which even the plurals are unapostrophised. In these last days of passing unnoticed among strangers I have relished my anonymity, my peace and the decorum of my inbox.

I have broken cover. I have been talking to the well-connected blogger Zinnia Cyclamen, whose prose has that limpid quality which is the product of intellect, fastidiousness and rigour, and in whose presence one’s own punctuation and grammar reflexively adopt their best behaviour. Zinnia is a writer and a humanist funeral celebrant whose adventures are a must-read.

Zinnia has read a tranche of my text and critiqued it with an acuteness which has both enriched my thinking and exposed my prejuduces. Dammit, I’d meant to keep them tethered; I don’t want the Good Funeral Guide to be a manifesto. I must go straight to work and dig the me-ness out of it, especially in the section Creating the Ceremony. The process of evolution has begun.

Zinnia has also written about me on her blog and invited her e-chums to have a gander. You are very welcome.

I hope that, together, we can make something we are all proud of.

Oh heck, I’ve just checked my inbox. While I’ve been writing this, the first-ever comment has come in.

It’s nice. Thank you, Jan!