Category: blog

If some of you notice a deleted post, it’s because the joke is over.

Yesterday there was an amusing search string for which google offered us as the first port of call.

But I forgot how haughty google can be. By mentioning them and the search string together, I suspect I was seen to be fishing, and was promptly removed from the list.

Or maybe a thousand other posts really have been deemed more relevant.

I learned something new about the Co-op’s Funeral services today. They run a bit of desk-top publishing on the side. And right now they are running an offer. Die now, and get a free set of service booklets printed.

Which becomes rather more complicated if you’re a Piskie, and your service booklet needs to have more than a photo and the names of hymns (cross-referenced with the dusty Hymns Ancient and Presbyterian at the crematorium). For the co-op can only offer 4 sides of A5 for the text.

So, the funeral I will do next week will have the special offer co-op booklets on the outside, and the KB special on the inside. It’s all free this time, so we run with it.

But I saw the price list over the man’s shoulder.

Normally, the Co-op charge mouners anywhere from £50 – £150 for funeral booklets (depending on the number).

Every priest I know offers exactly the same service for free.

Oh, but the Co-op’s are professionally printed, I hear you say.
Yes. But that doesn’t mean they know how to print a booklet with evenly spaced margins. The samples I saw would have gone in my recycling pile.

So, dear mourners, save your money. Talk to your priest. And do not let the co-op talk you into things you don’t want and would be better done by someone else anyway.

On the other hand, I would recommend the service offered by this very clever feline in Rhode Island. She curls up with dying patients in the nursing home to let the nurses know it’s time to call the family…

A good day today. It began with a slow morning of deer watching with Molly, followed by a sparkly ferry crossing with divers flashing wings and shaking tail feathers all around.

A friend rang just in time for us to meet for lunch. Restaurant criteria: no Piskies.

Two book shops, a quick pass through Starbucks and out of Glasgow ahead of the traffic. Off to the cinema to see Harry Potter; home via Tescos, and an other beautiful ferry crossing with golden light shearing down and low white clouds curling around the hills.

The present Harry Potter film is of the book most people hated. I suspect the film will be equally unloved. But I have always liked the fifth book. It is angry and dark and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. The plot is thin, and the characters don’t progress much, caught between wanting love and sulking off in solitude because they can’t trust it. Which is, it seems to me, the very essence of being 15. Some years just have to be lived through. Rowling’s skill is in so perfectly charting the journey from childhood to adulthood — even if that means that book five has to be awkward and difficult and hard to love.