Glob-a-log

(Can this really be less environmentally harmful than cow farts…?)

It’s probably very wrong of me but this following article had me laughing out loud, at quite a few moments:

So many people want to scatter the ashes of family and friends in beauty spots that the government has been forced to step in with anti-pollution rules. Last month, staff at the Jane Austen House Museum in Hampshire discovered piles of human ashes scattered around the novelist’s home and gardens, and football grounds, rivers, parks, golf courses, lakes, rivers and mountain tops have all become favourite remembrance spots.

A new leaflet from the Environment Agency says that sites must be inspected if they are to be regularly used for scattering ashes. “Individual ceremonies are unlikely to pollute the water,” it reads. “But the site you choose must not be near buildings, people bathing or marinas. On a river, it should be 1km upstream of any water abstraction. You should spread the ashes as close to the surface of the water as possible and avoid windy days.

Avoiding windy days indeed. Quite probably, nothing would disturb the solemn & melancholic act of saying farewell to one’s nearest and dearest more than when their ashes would fly right back into the mourners’ faces.

Tears might be appropriate at such a sad occasion but having to rub bits of the dearly departed out of your eyes is probably not something that should be part of the ceremony.

Still, I’m kind of disappointed that the rising popularity of spreading the ashes of our loved ones isn’t linked in some way to global warming.

Everything else seems to be, these days - and I do think that it’s somewhat unfair that our cremated bits and pieces would appear to have less environmental impact than cow farts.

Ah well, you can’t have everything, I suppose, so we will have to do with the somewhat lesser evil of Jane Austen’s house getting slowly yet completely buried under a mountain of her devoted readers’ ashes.

Although it is a real pity that Manchester United have stopped people from throwing out their cremated dead on the pitch. It would be fun to imagine how, the next time that Cristiano Ronaldo took one of his famed & elegant dives, he would end up with bits of someone’s belovéd granddad shoved up his nose.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 21:10 and is filed under Columns, Politics, Satire, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.