My great grandfather, my grandfather and my father made coffins.
Suppose that one of the coffins which my great grandfather made in Surfleet in 1900 was for someone who had lived in a household of five people. Someone would have washed and laid out the body. Great grandad would have taken the coffin to the house and lifted the body into it, to stay there until burial day, which was probably not many days away.
The family members would have carried on with their lives, with a dead body in the house – nothing creepy or strange – I expect that’s what happened in most cases then.
I imagine that in 2019, if a local undertaker had said to a family: ‘We are very busy. We’ll send someone to lay out the body but we can’t take it away for 36 hours,’ all hell would have broken loose on Look North.
I think that some people have become so removed from death that when it happens they are astonished and resentful and seek to blame.
In his party-political letter of June 4, Nicolas de Jong says that people have died ‘before their time’. At what age should any person die? Who says? Who knows? The length of a person’s life is not the only measure of that life.
I didn’t record the words of Nicola Sturgeon on TV on June 10 but she said something like this: ‘It is easy for people who don’t have to make the decisions to look back, knowing what we know now, and criticise those who made the decisions then, based on what they knew then.’
Words like ‘scarred generation’, ‘blood on their hands’ and ‘before their time’ are catchy.
Are they also a bit glib? Which generations had plain sailing all the way?
Frances Richardson
Surfleet
