Remembering Dory Previn
Posted by Vale A week or so ago one of my heroines died – the musician, writer and singer Dory Previn. She hasn’t recorded much, but for those who know her work she is unmatched in her musicality, wit, dark humour and willingness to explore the darker parts of the mind and a woman’s experience […]
Cremnivores
Gloucester crematorium’s Arbor restaurant is now offering Sunday lunch. Observes one Gloucester resident wryly: “It seems a bit odd – and perhaps even slightly macabre – for them to be offering roast meat to people, given that their main business is to cremate bodies. I’m not sure I’d like to eat my Sunday roast in […]
Short cuts round the back
Chicago, Monday. Police receive a call about a suspicious person in a car outside Carter Funeral Chapels. They go, and find the back door off its hinges. There is no electricity in the building. It transpires, after investigation, that in winter corpses are left in the garage of this funeral home to keep cool; in […]
Ash Wednesday – buy now!
Posted by Vale Every age has a genius, a spirit, a particular character. The Victorians, for example, excelled at sentimentality and three volume novels, while, in ancient Greece, philosophers lounged on street corners making public nuisances of themselves. But what of our own age? What do we do that defines us? There are lots of […]
Quote of the day
“Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” Writer Cormac McCarthy
No smoke without pyre
Unlike most countries, cigarettes are sold in singles in India and most shops that sell them have electric lighters attached to the wall for their customers to use. An anti-smoking campaigner fitted the lighters with a device which plays the Indian death chant every time someone lights a cigarette. “Raam Naam Satya Hai” is chanted […]
Afterburner
After washing his eyes reddened by a heavy dose of marijuana, Sadhu Premdas steps into the Bagmati river, looking for some half-burnt logs of wood to light a fire at his place. Belonging to the Aghori sect of sages, Premdas does not accept fresh firewood distributed by the Pashupati authority: he loves a fire made […]
Celebrants talk business
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Two topics that have inspired lively debate here recently are ritual and business. Comments about the latter reveal many civil funeral celebrants feel their service is undervalued in monetary terms. The going rate, between £120 and £180 a funeral, is deemed inadequate as a business model. This fee, which is unregulated […]
Quote of the day
Posted by Vale “I still use a manual typewriter (a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robin’s-egg blue) because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys on a computer keyboard doesn’t quite fit with my sense of what writing sounds like. I need the hard metal clack, and I need those keys to sometimes catch […]
Post mortem photography
Posted by Vale We had quite a debate recently when we published some recent post mortem photgraphs. They were respectful, intriguing and, some of them, quite lovely in their own way. But they made us – and some of you – uneasy. Did the photographer have permission to publish? Was it right to expose the […]
