To boldly go

Regular readers may remember that I collect floral tributes. The curious custom of laying shaped and decorated wreaths on graves and at the crematorium. Since we go walking in the graveyard on a regular basis to cool fractious tempers (Buddy’s and mine), I’ve been able to capture even more.

Mostly floral tributes are just flowers, a wreath, maybe a heart shaped wreath. But sometimes they’re little works of art that capture something about the personality of the dearly departed.

Like this:

I can certainly say I’ve never seen a Star Trek floral tribute so I was quite excited. I told the Vol-in-Law about it and the Superman one I’d seen the same day.

ViL: On the same grave, I suppose?
ME: Oh, yes. You don’t see many like that.
ViL: I guess geeks don’t die very often.
ME: Or maybe they usually don’t have enough friends to actually bring floral tributes.

The key to the garden of stone

Yesterday we took Cletus to the re-dedication of a WWII civilian war memorial. Although Remembrance Sunday is about fallen soldiers, it was good to remember the loss of life locally during the war. From the collection of names on the memorial, some must have been sleeping in their beds or gathered round the dinner table or sheltered together in the space under the stairs when the bombs fell.

This was how they were remembered:

with plastic lettering slipping away.

But the memorial has been redone, with nice bronze plaques and raised lettering and new paving leading up to the memorial. And indeed it looks lovely. So yesterday, the rededication was held and they released doves and everything. We really, really meant to be on time. But we weren’t. You see, the memorial is at one end of the cemetery and although we come from that direction we have to walk down to the middle of this very long graveyard to get to the entrance and then walk all the way back. It’s probably about 2/3ds of a mile and to be honest, we really just didn’t allow enough time. We’re still not factoring in how much time it takes to get a baby ready.

Baby and war memorial

So by the time we got there the doves were gone and the folks were breaking up. But we did get invited to tea and we were given the combination to the nearest gate. Obviously we can’t abuse that, but it saves us a quite a long walk along the busy road.

And I used the combination today to slip easily into the graveyard and funnily enough, the doves were back, just milling around, waiting. Two lovely white peaceful doves.

Last week, I also made my usual trip to the Garden of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey. I noticed that the wreath to Arkansas soldiers wasn’t there, I wondered if the old man who always brought a wreath for the Razorbacks who had treated him so well as a boy during the war was gone or if he just hadn’t made the trip yet. I also noticed the crosses from the DoD (I guess) were the same ones from last year.

It’s now US dead 3860, UK 171 and Other 133

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Here’s what I said about Remembrance Sunday last year and here’s what Kathy has written this year helping us to remember the living and the dead.

Grave policy implications

More seasonal policy pronouncements. This time about the disturbing trend of making graves safe by absolutely ruining them, laying headstones flat or tying them to giant dowel rods hammered into the ground. The idea is that some people somewhere were killed by falling headstones, and so local authorities must test the stability of all stones (using a topple testing machine) and then make them safe.

Finally someone’s standing up to the topple tyranny; John Mann, a Labour MP for Bassetlaw.

John Mann says no-one has been killed by falling headstones in churchyards in the past 10 years. Yet families are being forced to pay for graves to be made safe in local council graveyards because of “inaccurate” risk assessment tests. Headstones are made safe by a process known as “staking”, in which wooden stakes are driven into the ground next to the headstones to prevent them toppling over.

The Local Government Association states that most councils pay to make graves safe themselves, but where grave owners are charged to make graves safe the costs are reasonable. I’m not sure what reasonable is, but our local cemetery manager told us the cost and it was somewhere around £200 or £300 ($400-$600).

I’d say that roughly between 70% to 80% of graves in our local cemetery have been staked.

And as Mann points out, these aren’t necessarily the old graves, but rather ones less than a decade old. He paid for a topple test and claims that 95% of the staking is unnecessary.

These things simply don’t fall on people. There is much more chance of people dying on their way to church,” added Mr Mann.

New health and safety guidelines for gravestones were issued in 2004 after reports of five deaths caused by falling headstones. But Mr Mann said councils were being “tremendously over zealous” in their application of the rules and “a whole industry” had sprung up around “topple-testing” of graves. He said the graves being tested were often too small to topple over and cause injury let alone death – but they were still being “staked” by private contractors, at a cost of “hundreds of pounds” to berieved families.

Oh yes. We had a run-in with one of these contractors back in March.

The ViL pointed to the staked marker at our feet. The plastic straps weren’t even touching the headstone, which was one of those low lying ones that barely rose 12 inches from the ground. Sure it was at risk of crumbling – if you jumped on it, a bunch – but the stake rising from the ground at a 45 degree angle posed a greater safety hazard.

In a radio interview yesterday, Mr Mann also claimed that the stakes themselves were a greater risk to health and safety, being trip hazards. I’d concur. I’ve seen headstones that stood no more than ten inches off the ground staked – with the stake standing dangerously high over the marker.

a martyr to health and safety

Mr Mann further states that trees and branches are a bigger hazard to the cemetery visitor. Certainly in our local cemetery many branches hang hazardously from old and cankered trees and the footpaths are dangerously uneven – an elderly person might easily fall and break a hip.

Really. This staking is just plain insane, especially when one can spot greater risks with an untrained eye. And how this fits in with the policy recommendation to make better use of these dead spaces is beyond me.

Ghoulish policy

Today, on Halloween, CABE (The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment)
issued a report on the uses of cemeteries as open spaces for all, not just the dead.

The report found that up to half of all open spaces in some local authority areas were made up of burial grounds – and that this is an untapped resource.

Sarah Gaventa, director of CABE Space, said “Cemeteries should not be considered solely as resting places for the dead, they should be designed with the living in mind too. The great Victorian cemeteries were designed and maintained as beautiful public parks for the enjoyment of all. Every local authority should have them in their green space strategy and ensure that their full value is realised.”

Our nearest green space is a graveyard, and we go walking there almost every day. I occasionally see other people using the cemetery for walking (even jogging once), but it’s very rare. The cemetery workers are used to seeing me now, and they certainly don’t make me feel unwelcome. But I reckon a lot of people wouldn’t feel entirely comfortable recreating in a place of eternal rest.

When I die…

Since one of our most frequent recreational past times is taking a walk in the nearby cemetery, we play the “when I die” game a lot.

When I die:

• Don’t bury me in this crappy cemetery.
• I want a kick ass floral memorial – like maybe this one – only in single malt/ sipping whiskey flavor.
• I want to enter the fossil record, so you have to bury me in a zone of accretion rather than erosion (I majored in Geology in college)

But never once has either of us said:

When I die, please steal a street sign, turn it around and write my whole life story in both Arabic and English and cover my grave with a random assortment of fake flowers which you may or may not have collected from other parts of the cemetery.

Hell and highwater

There’s been a lot of flooding in England over the last two days. Fortunately, we’re still high and only slightly damp. Or rather we’re slightly damp and nervously quite low. The local cemetery, which lies in the same flood plain that our house is built in (but lower down the gradient) experienced some temporary high water after yesterday’s torrential rains.

There was even more water yesterday, but much of it has drained away. This photo was taken today in the very low lying “memorial garden” section of the cemetery. There are only markers and urns of ashes (at that) – so no fear of bodies floating in the streets of Tooting.

Putting the fun in funeral

Last year I missed the Lambeth Cemetery Open Day. I had a previous engagement. But I was excited to learn that there would be another one this year when we went on one of our frequent walks in the nearby boneyard. I was dying to go. And so we went. And this was the first public event outing for Baby Cletus.

Now, you might think that a cemetery open day would be a moribund affair – and you would largely be right. There was, as far as I could see, a poor turnout. There were not throngs of onlookers crowding the roads as the parade of hearses toured the cemetery.

A gaggle of coffin cars

The famous Harley Davidson motorcycle hearse

And we didn’t manage to get one of the offered rides in the hearses. This one looked quite fun:

But we did manage to go on the Tomb Trek during which the cemetery manager went around showing us special graves and sharing the history of the cemetery. We learned:

• around 250,000 people are buried in Lambeth Cemetery. Stacked like hotcakes or buried in between the spaces of old graves. Many of the original graves are long, long gone.
• The cemetery is chock full of London music hall and variety greats. None of whom I’d heard of – but there were bullet catchers and Wild West type acts and circus folk, too. And that’s kinda cool.
• Charlie Chaplin’s father is buried in a mass grave there and Ida Lupino’s father and other kinfolk are also buried there (in a private plot).
• A quarter of an acre of fresh burial space can generate a revenue of £1.5 million