When I die, have my funeral in the back lawn!

www.samsungbola.com | Agen Bola dan Kasino Online | Agen Bola Terpercaya | Bandar Bola |

GETTY

More people are being buried in back gardens with the rising cost of funerals

“Oh, I wouldn’t like that at all,” my dad would say, never quite sure if she was joking or not.

“You won’t let her bury me standing up, mart, will you?” he’d plead to me, and I’d shrug in a hopeless sort of way. As a teenager I didn’t really want to think about either of my parents shuffling off the mortal coil.

Happily, my mother didn’t quite have the heart to follow through on that plan and when my dad passed away back in 1995 he was laid to rest, horizontally, in Stanmore, Middlesex. It was pouring with rain as he was buried but then a rainbow appeared. One of those astonishing moments.

Nevertheless it is not unheard-of for people to be laid to rest in an unorthodox manner. In the churchyard of the 14th century St John’s Church in Pinner, a few miles from where I grew up, there is a huge triangular tombstone pierced by a stone encased coffin halfway up.

The deceased, a certain William London, said that his descendants would retain the property bequeathed by him so long as he remained interred “above ground”. It just shows how keen people were to get hold of a dead relative’s house, even back in 1809.

Imagine that particular detail turning up on ye olde Zoopla.

Compared to this rather grotesque send off, the notion that some poorer folk, unable to meet the £3,000-£7,000 cost of a proper private funeral, are burying their loved ones in the back garden seems positively mundane.

According to South Shields MP Emma Lewell-Buck, based on research by insurer royal London, about 110,000 people are now left with an average debt of £1,300 after forking out for funerals, prompting many to consider burying their relatives under their own lawn, vegetable plot or flower bed.

I must admit I quite fancy this idea and I suspect I am not alone. After all if you have spent decades trying to pay off the mortgage on your home, why pay to be taken elsewhere when the Grim reaper comes a’ calling?

I love my garden and the thought of spending the rest of eternity under it doesn’t bother me at all. Funerals are, by definition, pretty miserable occasions but made all the more gloomy in my view by being held in horrible little single-storey crematoriums that look like mini- supermarkets or, worse, obscure churches whose doors you never darkened in your lifetime.

If you didn’t bother going to that ugly little church 11 miles away off an obscure B-road when you were alive, why should you be stuck there for ever and ever, Amen?

I will take great pleasure in haunting my own garden, chasing off errant foxes and returning Frisbees

A funeral on your own lawn, followed by an internment in the same place, makes perfect sense to me. Lovely, too, that after the ceremony, your grieving mourners only have to toddle a few steps up the garden path to the kitchen for the obligatory fish-paste sandwiches and endless cups of tea.

According to estate agents, a body buried in the garden can take about £50,000 off the value of the house but who cares if you are not around to benefit from the profits anyway?

The biggest disappointment about one’s own funeral is that you are not around to enjoy it yourself, especially if you have taken a lot of trouble to choose the music and the readings and quite like the idea of people blubbing over you. However if it is in my own garden I don’t see why I can’t enjoy it a little in advance by having the grave dug a bit earlier and used as an ornamental fish pond until I’m ready to climb into it.

I have always liked the idea of a nice deep pond where I can have some of those really big koi carp they favour in Japan. When the time comes, the pool can be drained off and the koi bequeathed to another enthusiast as part of my Last Will & Testament.

Subsequently, of course, I will take great pleasure in haunting my own garden. I will chase away errant foxes, mysteriously return the footballs and Frisbees of neighbouring children, terrify potential burglars and put the wind up all those annoying neighbours who disturbed my Sunday afternoons with their blessed power tools.

What fun to make a sudden appearance just as they are revving up their sander or drill. I might have a bit of a wander around inside my home, too, making sure no one’s sold my records or books and give the dog a reassuring pat. There will be a ghost in my house, and it will be me!

www.samsungbola.com | Agen Bola dan Kasino Online | Agen Bola Terpercaya | Bandar Bola |