The terrifying price of too-long life
If you like waking up to war, famine, pestilence and people shouting at each other you like Radio 4. Oddly, I do. This morning I emerged from a day-denying doze to hear medical people warning of the cancerous perils of alcohol, even small amounts of it. You too perhaps. Chilling stuff. The advice seems to […]
Good 0 Evil 1
You may or may not remember a post here about an ad placed in the Liverpool Echo by the Fairways Partnership, a wholly owned subsidiary of the damned Co-operative Funeralcare. If you can’t, refresh your memory. A good, decent, ordinary man who also happens to be a very, very good funeral director, complained about it […]
Rite on
Presently, more than 50 per cent of people who die in an NHS hospital do not receive last offices. How did it come to pass that hospitals stopped performing last offices for dead patients? How was it that a ritual as old as time was so coldly abandoned? How did it come to be acceptable […]
Lords of all they survey
We may worry about societal death denial and a consequent tolerance of poor funerals but there’s no denying we’re not, most of us who work in the death zone, much cop at getting society to sit up and take notice of what we think. It’s rare that we come across a serious treatment of death […]
Meet Angeline Gragasin and Caitlin Doughty
I know a number of you drop in around this time (10.30 am) hoping there may be a new post because you need a little light displacement activity. Well, I’ve got you something that’s anything but little and light. Two short films here by Angeline Gragasin starring/narrated by Caitlin Doughty “documenting the life of a […]
On whose authority (2)
Back on 1 Feb 2010 I wrote a post which began: It’s an interesting fact that a funeral director can go to a hospital mortuary and collect a dead person to bring back to their funeral home on the verbal instruction of that dead person’s executor. It attracted a lively discussion. You can read it all […]
News blossom
Here’s a wee roundup of the week’s stories in tweets. All good stuff. Hannah Rumble and Douglas Davies on burial rites and natural burial. Podcasts – http://bit.ly/e6Lflt Funeral Party (it’s a noisy band – not my thing, maybe your thing) –http://nyp.st/fl1D1z The utter ignorance of funeral consumers almost matched here by a very […]
Review: Your Digital Afterlife
You wait and wait for a great book to come along. Unlike buses, great books don’t come along four at once. They are as single as they are singular. Today’s great book is Your Digital Afterlife. There have been sporadic lightweight journalistic treatments of the growing importance of making provision for our virtual assets. I […]
Bonus culture
If you are out celebrating this weekend, spare a toast to the lucky managers of Co-operative Funeralcare, who have just banked their annual bonuses. For those in Bands 3 and 4, that’s £2,500 — £5,000. For those in Bands 1 and 2, who are on a long-term incentive plan, that’s serious moolah. The Good Funeral […]
Your Digital Afterlife
I bought a copy of Your Digital Afterlife as soon as it came out, some weeks ago. Since then, it has been sitting on the bookshelf reproachful and unread — the next worst thing to a stack of ironing. I’ve just made a start. It’s blinking BRILLIANT. It’s an important area this. Where we once […]
