200 years since our PM was shot
It’s quite a year for anniversaries from the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee to the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. It’s also a year when deaths are commemorated from Captain Scott’s failed mission to the South Pole in 1912 to the sinking of the Titanic in the same year. Less well known is that 2012 […]
Norfolk Funerals
Norfolk Funerals, which opened recently, is the UK’s first and only not-for-profit funeral director. It is a charity, based in Norwich, and it offers funerals at cost price for all merchandise plus a fee to cover overheads, running costs and the wages of its employees. Eyebrows have been raised. What’s going on here? Why would […]
We Believe
A new website has just hit the scene: CommunityFunerals.org.uk. It seeks to develop the concept of a not-for profit community funeral service, and presents for consideration four models of what it calls a Community Funeral Society (CFS). It hopes to grow the idea organically by inviting feedback from its readers, then incorporating their ideas. It’s a […]
Thoughts of a funeral-goer
Posted by Lyra Mollington Nearly twelve years ago, I was with my grandchildren in the queue for the newly opened London Eye when we saw an elderly man collapse. Paramedics arrived quickly but by the time the man was lifted onto a stretcher, a blanket had been pulled over his head. It took […]
Communityfunerals.org.uk
We apologise for pulling the post on CommunityFunerals.org.uk without explanation. The website came under sustained and relentless attack from YouKnowWho. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. At this moment, 23 men in oily overalls and bearing large spanners are working round the clock, without breaks, to restore the site. All […]
Alexander McQueen: a commentary on death and decay
Phoebe Hoare, who’s put some really good things our way, suggests it’s time we did something on Alexander McQueen, the fashion designer. She’s quite right. It’s not as if his work does not dwell and brood on death, dying, mortality and moral blackness. Before becoming a student at Central St Martin’s, McQueen cut his teeth […]
To Know Him Is To Love Him
A bit of funerary scholarship from the sagacious Vale Of borderline relevance only to funeralists, perhaps – but the title of the song was taken by Phil Spector, who produced it, from the inscription on his father’s headstone. It’s unlikely that the same words will adorn Phil’s. Older readers will enjoy the nostalgia jolt produced […]
Everybody needs a tribe…
Guest post by Fran Hall, Chair of Trustees, the Natural Death Centre Readers of the GFG Blog are many and myriad – for the few of us who stir ourselves to comment on the superb diet served up daily by the ragged-trousered philanthropists Messrs Cowling and Honeysett, and their regular contributors, (not least the Friday […]
Care more
Posted by Vale Seth Godin has been called ‘America’s greatest marketer’. Well they go in for superlatives don’t they? But his blog – Seth’s Blog – is full of interesting ideas and reflections about the way that businesses operate. He recently blogged about caring more and what it might mean for a business: Politicians are […]
‘Moose…Indian’ – whose last words?
Posted by Vale 150 years ago yesterday Henry David Thoreau died. I’ve loved him ever since I came across his views on the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Emerson had written in praise of it, but Thoreau – with something of the prophet in him – refused to be enthusiastic simply noting that “perchance the first […]
