On EU referendum day I had my first funeral at Boston Crematorium, the English heartland of Brexit, with a higher percentage of people who want Britain out of the EU than anywhere else in the country.  It was a damp, grey morning as I drove from Newark across miles of largely empty farmland.  As I pulled into the car park of a large Asda, the Boston Stump loomed out of the mist.  Driving on through the town I saw rows of neat terraced houses interspersed with Eastern European food stores. The crem. is a grim fifties edifice in some well-kept parkland.  I was shown into the Vestry and later given a quick tour of the chapel and shown the buttons for changing the music and closing the curtains.  I drove back to Newark at lunchtime, and in the afternoon picked up my motorbike from the garage and had a nice chat with the garage owner about bikes and touring and double-checking the bill he even found a mistake and knocked a few quid off.  Then I went to the P...

I did my ninth funeral yesterday, number ten tomorrow.  I like to arrive at least an hour early, to be on the safe side, so I took a camera with me to Mansfield Crematorium to keep me occupied while I waited.  That's me reflected in the entrance doors to one of the "chapels".  It's an odd coincidence that I'm doing many of my services not far from where dad was brought up in Pleasley.  In fact a couple of weeks ago I did a service for a retired miner who may have been working at Pleasley Colliery in 1940/41, when my dad worked there briefly.  As a result of taking miner's funerals I've learnt more about them and the industry and its record of industrial accidents and diseases. Wandering around the Crematorium grounds, as I often do, I've frequently seen rabbits nibbling at the discarded wreaths and bouquets and yesterday I got a photo of one.  I guess there are worse ways to use so-called "floral tributes" than as food for bunnies. I...

It's been a hectic couple of weeks.  Funerals work is now starting to come in and the weekend before last I did a course on baby naming. I've done three funerals in the last two weeks and have another one booked for next week, including my dad that means I've done six so far.  It's hard and stressful work, but also very rewarding and I've had wonderful feedback so far.  There are some frustrations however.  My fellow celebrants are a very mixed bunch, some are really great and some are in it because they like the sound of their own voice and/or to allow their prejudices to have a free rein. I am definitely a humanist, but I'm becoming clearer and clearer that I don't especially want to conduct "humanist" funerals, I would rather conduct a funeral as a humanist, which for me is quite a different thing.  Lots of my colleagues have a hatred, even a fear, of any religious references within a service, thus creating a kind of "humanist space...

I'm sat in the my Dad's little back bedroom, with the junk that accumulates around someone old and disabled - a power chair, for the increasingly infrequent trips outside the house, a turntable for moving from chair to commode and a collection of cushions and dressings.  My time here is drawing to a close and from my point of view I've achieved a fair bit.  I've begun to establish myself as a funeral celebrant and have carried out my first funeral.  I had thought I'd want to write about this in my blog, but this now feels like a breach of confidence.  Suffice to say it strengthened my conviction that this is work I should be doing and I'm humbled by the trust that the bereaved placed in me. I've shared a lot of the celebrancy stuff with dad and this has had a positive impact on our relationship as well.  He has been very supportive really and I've also recorded a series of his wishes for what happens when he dies, including what music will be played ...

Sometimes when I'm travelling I get up early, put my running shoes on and just jog for fifteen minutes or half and hour, stop, look around at where my legs have taken me, then run back the way I came.  This habit has taken me to some interesting places.  If you start in a town you'll often end up in some quiet, out of the way spot in the country.  Some of them have really stuck in my mind - a rice padi on the island of Langkawi, a misty rural canal in Northern France.  Now I take an iphone around with me I can even take a photo and spot my exact location on a map. I'm staying in digs in Lincoln for the next three weeks and this morning, before dawn, I put on my running shoes and headed out of the city down the Nettleham Road.  Even at 6.30am there were lots of commuters driving into town.  It was colder than I'm used to in Italy and so I ran a bit faster than usual, trotting through the outskirts of town past cut-price gyms and Pizza Huts in modern in...

Dear Ellis, I'm writing this for you, in case years from now you type your name into a search engine, assuming that search engines and the internet are still around  and that the pages of this blog will have survived on a server somewhere. My name is Doug and I conducted the ceremony on 12th April 2014 when your mum and dad gave you your name.  It was my first ceremony.  That's me in the picture below holding my script for the service in the gardens of the Castello di Semivicoli while we were all waiting to go into the little chapel where the naming took place. Your mum asked me to conduct the service because she knew me and that I'd trained as a humanist celebrant.  Actually I've only trained to carry out funerals and yours was my first service of any sort.  I hope to go on to do lots more, but who knows.  Humanists don't believe in a god or an afterlife, but they do believe in humankind and that we are all responsible for living in harmony and mak...