Telling Detail Captured by The Eye of The Camera

I've just noticed something in the photo of the undertaker's shop window in the previous post - if you look through the door into the shop, you'll see a box of tissues underneath a table light (which is probably never turned off), with what is almost certainly a condolences book in front of it.

Brand identities

Here's an English undertaker's shop window, followed by my thoughts on what we might call undertaking corporate style from Over Your Dead Body:

"A persistent whiff of Victoriana often surrounds the appurtenances and procedures of undertaking.

Take the traditional window display. The look is Victorian High Church Gothic with fumed oak, stained glass and polished brass, or the more austere Arts & Crafts look with blonde oak and bright metal fittings. Traditional contents include cinerary urns, flower holders for graves, and photos of horse-drawn hearses. And when this is replaced by dried flower arrangements flanked by corporate slogans and logos, in a cack-handed attempt to make the front office look like an estate agent’s, the changes usually stop at the STAFF ONLY signs.

(The best window display I ever heard of was the Co-op’s in Blackburn. It was a tropical fish tank with lumps of coal sitting on crushed coal on the bottom, with black fish and a purple light at the back.)

Other modernising efforts will also be limited to what meets the public gaze - shiny grey two-piece suits instead of black jackets & waistcoats with grey pinstripe trousers, and a Volvo or Mercedes hearse instead of a Daimler."

Curious Swedish Customs

Speaking of Skogskyrkogården (see previous post), one of my visits there included a behind-the-scenes tour not available to members of the public. On it, I was surprised to discover that there is a huge mortuary in the basement, a gigantic white space with trolleys covered with sheets standing in it, in which perspective seems to fade into a snowfield-style horizonless whiteout reminiscent of the overexposed look that Lucas used in his first film, THX 1138.

Dozens of bodies are stored there awaiting disposal, almost always by cremation - an undertaker in Stockholm that I know only does perhaps two burials a year. Burial is prohibitively expensive in Sweden unless you have a family plot with room left in it.

It's America, Australia, Britain and France where undertakers look after the body - and the countries of the former British and French colonial empires? If anyone knows other places where undertakers take charge of the body and store it on their premises, please leave a comment here. 

Everywhere else, they just do the paperwork and put the body in a box before the funeral. The body is stored in a hospital morgue, and the hospital does the embalming, too.

The odd thing about Sweden, though, is the amount of time they leave between the death and the funeral, at least three weeks, and not unusually, two to three months.

They're usually surprised when I tell them everyone else does it a lot quicker (Jews and Muslims being the winners here), and I've been given two explanations for this:

1. "It's because people might have a long way to travel." - And then again, they might not, and people might have to travel a long way everywhere else, too, but they don't arrange the funeral months after the death.

2. "It's historical: over most of Sweden, for most of the year, the ground's frozen too hard to dig a grave. That's why Swedish graveyards have a special house that was used to store the bodies until summer came." - Sounds more like it, and yes, Swedish churchyards do often have a charnel house. We have them in old churchyards in Britain, too, but ours were used to store bones which had been removed to make room for more burials.

There's a problem, though - it gets just as cold in Norway, but they don't do that there. They just light a bonfire on top of the plot to thaw the ground before the grave is dug. 

So if any anthropologists or experts on Swedish funeral customs know a better explanation, please post a comment.

THX 138 (George Lucas)

Most Beautiful Cemetery

All cemeteries have a kind of rus in urbe appeal - open space, greenery, mature trees - and then there's the added appeal of statuary and monumental stonework. Also, paradoxically, they're usually full of life. 
Excepting the over-neat mown-and-clipped-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life municipal cemetery with gravestones conforming to council regulations, most cemeteries are ecological enclaves for insect and wildlife, pockets of the nearest thing to actual countryside in or near towns. 

Considering the actual countryside itself isn't that much like countryside anymore, more swathes of pesticide-drenched monocultures with no hedges or margins, cemeteries are often the nearest thing to country in the country. And they aren't just parks without the football, children and dogshit in towns, either; they're a network of nature reserves.

So they're all beautiful in one way or another, but which is the prettiest that you know?

Let's have some tips and recommendations, places to look out for when we visit new towns, or unsuspected gems in our own area.

My tip might be a bit of a way off for most of you, but it's actually worth a trip in its own right. Skogskyrkogården in Stockholm.

Pronounced skog-shirker-gordon, "The Woodland Cemetery" is a Unesco world heritage site, and it deserves to be. It's an immaculate marriage of landscape and architecture, designed by Gunnar Asplund (one of the inventors of Swedish Modernism) and Sigurd Lewerentz.

The first time I went there it was covered in snow, and the only other people we saw all day were Marc Newson and his mate. He's an Australian designer (Marc Newson, not his mate. But I suppose his mate might have been an Australian designer, too, for all I know).

It's like a giant landscape sculpture that you walk around and in, where everything is perfectly placed and balanced. If you're in Stockholm, make the effort. You won't be sorry, it's only 15 minutes from town on the green tunnelbana line and it's got its own station.