Much to celebrate?
When wireless listeners switched on for the BBC Home Service (now R4) news on Good Friday, 1930, the announcer began in familiar terms in his familiar dark brown voice: “This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news. There is no news today.” The resulting startled gap was filled with 15 mins of pianoforte […]
Thought for the day
From Rebecca Solint’s A Fieldguide to Getting Lost: All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture encounter adulthood as a prison, and death […]
Memo to self
Most people think of a memorial as a sole-purpose ‘something’, there to do exactly what the shot-blast lettering says it’s there to do. A headstone, for example. Headstones are self-absorbed, stand-alone symbols. They add nothing to their surrounding headstones, neither do they detract from them. They do not beautify the landscape; they may uglify it. […]
More lapidary obits
Here are some latest extracts from my favourite obituary pages, in the Times Colonist, Canada. What I admire about the best of these is their lapidary nature, their restraint, their decorum. Above all, I admire the careful thought that has gone into epitomising the person who has died. In just a few words a person’s nature is made palpable. […]
Partial eclipse of the Moonies
The Moonies, followers of that well-known oxymoron Sun Moon, want to create a one-acre natural burial ground in the village of Stanton Fitzwarren, near Swindon. It’s not just for Moonies; the villagers are welcome, too. The villagers aren’t happy, of course. The English are not natural-born embracers of change (or even of each other); they […]
Tarantara!
The Good Funeral Guide is published today! Available from all good bookshops, one or two very bad ones and all the usual online suspects.
Carla
Here’s the news I’ve been dreading and, if you’ve been following Carla’s blog, you will have been, too. In her own words: Carla Zilbersmith, born December 15, 1962, died today, May 17th, 2010. Carla Zilbersmith died in her home this afternoon of Lou Gherig’s disease, also known as ALS. Carla Zilbersmith was mother to Maclen Zilber, […]
Greening grief
The GFG motored purposefully south yesterday afternoon to Chiltern Woodland Burial Park. It was a three-birds-with-one-stone mission: to have a look at this well-heeled natural burial ground; to hear the great Dr Bill Webster talk about grief; and to meet up with Louise from Sentiment and Jon from MuchLoved, two of Funeralworld’s Good Guys. I […]
Dig those stats
I received this interesting insight into Dignity’s profitability the other day from a good friend of the GFG, Andrew Plume. I was mulling over some Dignity stats the other day. Much is made of 65,000 funerals having been carried out for year ending December 2009. Given that they merrily declare having “546 funeral locations” in the […]
A funeral is a branding exercise
“The woman seated next to me on the plane told me her name was Stefanie but that she went by Adventure Girl … Then Adventure Girl asked me what my brand was. No one had ever asked me that before.” Thus begins a quest by Joel Stein to find his brand. “To get my brand […]
