Always alive
“I met the poet James Turner in my twenties: no one reads him now, yet to me he is always alive … You too must have people like that in your lives, people who are not alive in the physical sense, but remain alive in some spiritual way, which you retain in your head, in […]
How Mortonhall happened
By Ken West We are now aware that Mortonhall Crematorium cremated hundreds of babies and infants, and denied that any cremated remains existed. The recent report by Dame Elish Angiolini condemned this practice and exposed it as a scandal. More recently, the Infant Cremation Commission chaired by Lord Bonomy has reported. Anybody reading these reports […]
The FBCA – an apology
In the light of the Report of the Infant Cremation Commission by Lord Bonomy, 17 June 2014, I invited Ken West, a former manager of Emstrey crematorium, to give his interpretation of the training and practices which had led to the events which the Report investigated. At the same time (28 June 2014) I […]
Friday poem
Roadside Flowers by Paul Wooldridge The trees along my route are wrapped in flowers, quickly passed each day but only noticed by a few. Their colours burst then slip from view as each is lost, submerged in grey, their brightness all too quickly sapped.
Funerals for Football Fans
Posted by David Hall Although Lorry Drivers are top of the Vintage Lorry Funerals customer league table, they are closely followed in the number two position by Football Fans. Some Football Fan business has been derived from the 1950 Leyland Beaver’s red and blue livery and funerals have taken place for Fans whose teams play in […]
Branding
Posted by John Porter Strangeways prison, Manchester 1982, pre riot. I was a student on placement and during my first week asked an officer what the red and white cards meant outside each cell. “White means CofE and red is for ‘left-footers’ – Catholic.” Nothing for Jewish, Muslim, Sikh or any other religious flavour! I saw “HIV” on […]
Et in Arcadia ego
Posted by Richard Rawlinson I first came across this Latin phrase as a teenager reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Narrator Charles Ryder finds the words inscribed on a skull displayed in his bedroom. ‘Even in Arcadia, there I am,’ is the translation. Death, the great equaliser, prevails even in the most utopian lands, as certain in […]
Free until the point of death
Click the letter and you’ll make it bigger and readable. It’s from Angie Gunn, Mortuary Services Admin Co-ordinator at Stockport NHS Trust. It’s been sent to all local undertakers. “From 1 Oct, once all paperwork regarding the release of a body has been received, you will be contacted by a member of the Mortuary […]
It’s what they would have wanted
The woman who had died was young, her end sudden and tragic. She had fallen from a yacht and drowned. The funeral was big, loud and emotional. In the days following, many came on their own to lay flowers quietly on her grave. One weekday lunchtime a man was depositing a cellophane-wrapped bunch when he […]
Going out in credit
It is a long established principle of English law that there is no property in a corpse. As church lawyers in the middle ages used to say in that scholarly way of theirs (with a solemn nudge and a wink), a dead person – a cadaver – is cara data vermibus: flesh given to worms. It […]
