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 […]
Doing the rite thing
On Monday, in response to this: … we get to carry on without the benefit of a formal ceremony or other ritual observance after near-bereavement experiences like the breakdown of a relationship, or redundancy, or a child leaving home. We resolve those privately. Kathryn Edwards wrote: … from my ritualist perspective … how is it that we […]
Lobbying scandal strikes Funeralworld?
The lobbying scandal presently raging in Parliament has drawn the spotlight to all-party parliamentary groups — APPGs. Three dishonourable Labour peers were caught by undercover cameras (remember them?) telling reporters that an all-party parliamentary group could be set up as a lobbying vehicle for a fake South Korean solar energy company. The ignominious Patrick Mercer declared his willingness […]
Beyond wordless
David Aaronovitch tells a tale in today’s Times which seems to speak volumes about, uh, attitudes to death, or families, or Britishness or… something, such that I thought I must share it with you. The background is that the Aaronovich family dog, a Kerry Blue, has been diagnosed with cancer and will die soon. When […]
Funeralcare for sale?
The capital shortfall at the Co-operative Bank is estimated to be somewhere between £1–1.8 billion. This debt has been downgraded by Moody’s to junk status. The Co-op is going to have to sell assets in order to pay it off. Here’s the news for Funeralworld. Today’s Daily Telegraph speculates as follows: Further asset disposals are […]
