Tea lover has dad’s ashes mixed with clay and made into a teapot: A fine way to honour the dead – or get a revengeful last laugh, of course
First, let me tell you a story – an old Roald Dahl story, in fact, ‘William and Mary’, about a bullying scientist and his wife. He’s one of those nasty control freaks who will tell his wife which part of the house must be cleaned with what kind of brush & detergent; who will tell her what to wear and how to eat and how to lift a tea cup.
He’s also quite obsessive about smoking and forbids her to smoke.
Then he dies – but he’s not gone. Being a scientist he’s had his brain put into some life-protecting and nurturing fluid. He can see through one of his own eyes, which floats in another bowl – and he can communicate with the world at large through a voice box.
So, each day his widowed wife visits the room where the brain and the lone eye and the voice box ‘live’. She disconnects the voice box and then she smokes a cigarette and blows smoke into the furious eye of her late tormenter.
Anyway, the next story that I read in one of today’s online papers is about a man, his dead father and a teapot but it’s not about revenge beyond the grave - not this time, at least:
Tea fan John Lowndes had his dad’s ashes mixed with clay and turned into a teapot. John, 54, used to enjoy a brew with Ian, 75, and got a potter to make the tribute in Broad Haven, Pembrokeshire.
It’s a nice idea, really – and as a memorial it beats having an urn standing on the mantelpiece, where it will just gather dust on the outside as well.
I’m sure some enterprising individual could make quite a decent living from such a pottery as well. Pipe-smoking sons of pipe-smoking fathers could have the ashes of the latter mixed with clay and turned into a pipe. If grandma loved to potter in the garden or bake cookies you could mix her ashes with the clay of a flowerpot or a nice cookie container. So many hobbies, so many options to make a pleasant and/or functional memorial.
Plus, as that Roald Dahl story showed, some people still have outstanding issues with the dead. In that case, you can say with Brutus, ‘I have not come to bury Caesar but to glaze him’ – and then stick the knife in posthumously.
Again, so many resentful brains, so many options. If the goner was a Gunner, mingle his ashes with clay that will make a Chelsea garden gnome. Was the much hated corpse allergic to cats, make him or her inhabit a clay moggie. Did he or she vote Labour religiously, make the despised deceased into a Maggie Thatcher commemorative plate.
In other words, mingle the dust of your nearest and not so dearest with the potter’s clay and do as Dahl’s widow did and blow that smoke into the now silent but still furious eye of that old nemesis.
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