It’s all good at Clandon Wood
Friday and Saturday 21 and 22 June marked the opening of Clandon Wood natural burial ground in the Surrey Hills, south of Guildford. The moving spirit behind the venture is Simon Ferrar, a man whose meticulous research has made him really quite famous in Funeralworld. There can’t be anywhere he didn’t visit, nor any person […]
Life stories don’t tell half the story
For the living there is much pleasure to be derived from surveying a person’s life when the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and their work is done. Dead, in other words. Works in progress – biographies of the living – just don’t cut it. Death focuses the mind on […]
What would you like to see on your TV?
When media people phone the press office here at the GFG-Batesville Shard, their requests for information often conform to whatever they suppose to be trending. “We’re doing something on living funerals. Are these catching on?” “No.” “We’re doing a documentary about the dying process and we want to film someone actually dying. Can you help […]
I like large funerals, they’re so intimate
Posted by Richard Rawlinson “I like large parties, they’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.” With this memorable quip in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the emptiness of Jordan Baker, one of the flappers who attend the parties at the mansion of Jay Gatsby. A great thing about The Great Gatsby […]
How they wear you down
I first heard from Lisa Mullan when she wrote to me on 23 Feb 2013: My father was told he had terminal lung cancer in May 2012 and had around 6 months to live. He subsequently purchased a Funeral Care Plan from the Cooperative Funeral Care, Plympton, Devon and requested he be buried at the […]
For Father’s Day
Posted by Kitty My dad died when he was 70. Just a few years earlier, he had been diagnosed with leukaemia. It was my sister who realised that something was wrong. He was yellow. He hadn’t noticed. Too busy enjoying his well-earned retirement. His doctor told him he would die with it rather than from it. […]
Does death really matter so little?
Citizens of the UK have no statutory right to bereavement leave. Momentous as the event of a death may be, it is not reckoned to be of sufficient magnitude to enjoy equal rights with birth. Says a lot about our cultural attitudes to mortality, doesn’t it? There’s currently an e-petition calling for a legal right […]
Undertakers feast on misery, situation normal
There’s a story in the Scottish Daily Mail, 7 June, that exemplifies very well the misinformation and scaremongering that are characteristic of media treatment of funerals in the UK. Here it is: LOCAL authorities and funeral directors are making money out of family misery, with ‘the cost of dying’ reaching thousands of pounds in Scotland, […]
Peaceful EV feeling
Was there anything we missed? We spent three days at the National Funeral Exhibition, most of it talking, very often to people with whom we have had a virtual relationship for years. It’s a weird thing about the world today that you can get to know someone very well indeed — without ever having met […]
Daddy, where were YOU at the NFE?
Are you coming to the National Funeral Exhibition? The NFE is the biggest and best business-boosting/networking/nattering event in Funeralworld and we are delighted to have been invited. To mark the occasion we are presently decanting the GFG-Batesville Shard, packing the wretched, zit-face interns into charabancs, and looking forward to spending the next three days sampling […]
