Do us all a favour and don't die fat

I'm a funeral celebrant, among other things. A few years back, I was conducting the funeral of a big man. His sons and nephews wanted to help carry his coffin into the crematorium chapel, so the bearers were a mixture of relatives and professionals. The music started to play and I signalled that we were ready, when one of the sons, who'd had some Dutch courage before he arrived, suddenly dived off into the waiting room to use the loo. I pulled a face at the conductor (the person from the funeral firm who's in charge of the practical arrangements - he was leading) to ask if we should wait, but I could see that, although the guys had only been standing there a few minutes, their knees were beginning to buckle. The conductor shook his head, and we carried on, leaving the son with the bladder problem to shuffle in after us. The trouble was that his father was at the limit, weight-wise, that could be accommodated at that crematorium. It had a standard-sized cremator. If he'd been any bigger, they'd have had to take his body miles away, to a crematorium that could cope with big people, and they'd have had to use the trolley because he'd have been too heavy to carry.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post about what to do with obese people. At that time, the nearest crematorium that could cope with them was about 90 miles away. Now we have a new crematorium locally that has an extra-large cremator. Here it is. Let's hope it's going to be big enough.

While typing this, I remembered that a while ago a celebrant friend wrote that she'd conducted a funeral for a young man "of heroic proportions". "He weighed well over twenty stone. He was carried in by his mates to the old '70s Hollies hit, 'He ain't heavy he's my brother'. Six of them carried him in, staggering, sweating and wobbling all over the place." You've got to laugh.