A friend of mine had that Mr. Klaus Kinski and party on board his nice old motor yacht.
Then Mr Kinski, being brown bread, went to sleep with the fishes in San Francisco Bay.
Cardboard coffins, perfectly legal, lots of sites, this one came up first. Plain brown for me I think.
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Perfect, I shall get one. Thanks Véro.
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So they are! Thanks. Since 2019 it seems so changed since we made funeral plan. Will have to change it (again!)
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thanks vero, have referred this to my wife, in th light of recent events; cheap as possible; i have no religion nor relatives to consider, just out of interest - i haver never heard of anyone left on top and noted the crematorium at the entry to brive hospital, presumably for the unknowns and indigent (q)
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It’s a long-established tradition in Tibet to carry the corpse of the deceased to an accessible point in the mountains (of which there is plenty) and leave it exposed to the elements and for the ever-circling and forensic vultures (of which there is a ravenous plenty) to pick clean.
Sky burial. Very ecologically sound, but I think the chopping-up is a redundant Daily Stale embellishment… 
That is what the Parsees do in India, they are Zoroastrians and in Bombay they put their dead in the Towers of Silence in the gardens on Malabar Hill, right next to where I lived.
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Interesting topic! The cardboard coffins look a bit like candy bars to my always-craving-sugar brain. The vision of vultures pecking away at a loved one is a bit distasteful to me - plus, we spent an entire week comparing and contrasting Prometheus Bound and Prometheus Unbound in one of my literature classes and I was about to offer up my own liver if that would’ve shortened things. What do you all think of composting? We garden greenie ghouls in Washington State are supposed to be able to arrange for this in 2021, but I dare say COVID will slow things up.
Great idea, if it isn’t going to be a pollutant. Big animals don’t break down as fast either so it might be complicated because of that, there’s a reason fallen stock and most pet horses went to the hounds rather than being buried.
I really fancy being cremated and put in gardens or windowboxes or something like that.
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One day when she was feeling a bit down, just before she died, we asked my mother where she would like to be instead of her bed. She said Nice, as it’s a place that meant a lot to her. So we plan to scatter her ashes there. Only problem is getting them there as don’t want to risk them being taken off me as I go through train/plane security… so most of them are still in my sister’s dining room. One day…
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You just need the certificate stating what is in the box and that it is legit to take them on the plane - my father was cremated in Hampshire and is on top of a dresser in my kitchen now, the customs people didn’t bat an eyelid.
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A friend of mine has the ashes of all her pets, that have gone to rainbow bridge. They all have their own little urn’s.
Our late pets are in the garden and have gravestones.
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Now I feel heartless, our pets went to the vet and that was that. We’ve kept their collars tho’.
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Ditto Vero, no gravestones, but ‘things’ my husband made with collars attached.
The only pet we could not manage to bury but he also has thing in the garden.
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Your words perfectly capture this painful and disgraceful means of ripping the heart out of a British childhood. But it’s not only in Britain. In France many poor families have the experience of children being put into care to be ‘educated’ because the state considers they’re growing up with ‘attitude’. The result is the 40% of SDF (sans domicile fixe) who are victims of that isolation and mental machinery imposed by a succession of state employees who can never take the place of loving parents, who are taken for granted by many of us
The British upper classes have a habit of producing emotionally crippled, repressed, heartless statesmen prepped for government. The decisions they then make are so much easier when they don’t have to feel the consequences!
But they are victims of the English Public School system. That’s the upper class version of being taken into care. Only difference is the parents have to pay for it.
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There is a new system where you are put into a metal box with certain chemicals and heated up for a few days and you totally disappear.
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“… and is on top of a dresser in my kitchen now.”
Back in the 70’s, when I was A & R for a couple of pals who had been given independent producers deals by Decca to “find the next Beatles”, we recorded some demos of a singer, guy called Ronnie.
Ronnie’s pièce de résistance, bizarrely, was a version of Dolly Parton’s “Joleen”. A very well controlled falsetto throughout.
And, lo! Ronnie got signed to a deal. Stardom beckoned. Well, a star has to have cool wheels. Pending the Ferraris, Aston Martins, Ronnie got a s/h MGB drop-head.
One night, after a few in the Warwick Castle, Maida Vale, hangout of a R n R crowd, Ronnie ran the B under the back of a truck on the Western Avenue.
He returned to the pub in a plastic vase and was put on a shelf behind the bar, amongst the optics.
Hi Jane, and welcome. Like others here I was born in WW2 in a very working class environment. I won’t call it a family s there was no father figure at any time in my life. We were dirt poor and survived on my mother taking a job in a school canteen and bringing home remains in assorted jars. She could easily have had my brother and myself placed "in care’ or ‘fostered out’ but she had her pride and wouldn’t allow that. There was nothing left over in the ‘love’ department though as she still resented the situation deeply… Much later in life I was to appreciate what she did - out of ‘duty’ if you will - certainly not out of any convenience to herself.
I was to compare this with the ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ life which was far removed from mine as the moon. The net fiction of course was to propagate the ‘production of manly chaps’ and the rest of the tripe.
I am far more convinced that the Harry Flashman character was far more typical of public school production! (if people haven’t read rgese books you have missed a major treat of Victorian life , history and hypocrisy plus laugh out loud humour!)
Later I was to meet people who had bloody awful parents in various ways.
So I remain convinced that it is better to have had no parents than bad ones. Both leave their scars, but the latter are surely worse?