Belief-beggaring Things That People Like to Tell Each Other

By which I mean stories that persist as adult fairy tales, "facts" that a moment's reflection will reveal as not just highly implausible, but impossible, including, but not limited to, so-called urban myths.

Here's one example that I mention in Over Your Dead Body, my book about the business of death  (see here for some architectural examples).

"Sex & Death and Art & Law

The possibly higher than average incidence of gayness amongst funeral directors seems, in my experience, to have escaped the prurient attention of the general public, perhaps because that attention seems to be so well focused on one prurient subject in particular.

There seems to be a well-established branch of the urban myth or factoid bank of apocryphal knowledge that everyone draws on that leads them to “know” of some kind of fourth or fifth-hand tale of an undertaker’s employee or morgue attendant being caught on the job with a stiff.

A bit like everyone seems to know of someone whose eye has come out of its socket (an industrial accident, or during surgery under local anaesthetic, etc) “so that they could see their own cheek” before it was put back. Or maybe this is a working class thing? Not talking of an eye being like a button on a bit of dangling thread, but “knowing” stories like this. But surely everyone tells each other stories like this when they’re at school?

Anyway, it’s rubbish. An eye isn’t on a bit of elastic, once it comes out it stays out. And it doesn’t come out very easily either; aside from the fact that the optic nerve isn’t elastic, there are muscles attached all round the edges.

And I’ve never heard any stories of necrophiliac funeral or hospital staff.

People dying on the job, I’ve heard of – reaching orgasm… like running for a bus… strain on the heart etc  – but the only Sex & Death story I can do is that the best pair of tits I’ve ever seen were on a dead woman in her 60s – no, that trivialises it – the finest pair of breasts I’ve ever seen.
 

It was a removal from a posh house on a fringe of Balmer’s territory that bordered on an upmarket area.

The first surprise was being led into a room on the ground floor, immediately after walking through the front door, that wasn’t made up as a bedroom – most people who die at home die in bed, or on the toilet (straining at stool… unaccustomed exertion… weak heart etc again).

The second was that the body was laid out on a big sideboard against the wall, like a buffet from a Peter Greenaway film – laying out is rare nowadays even in working class homes with rural Irish connections, and this was a middle class home, and the name on the jobsheet was English. And in a laying out, the body’s normally in a coffin on trestles in the middle of the room.

The body was draped with a sheet, and underneath it more surprises: the eyes were open, and the body was dressed in nothing but a pair of white panties. But the most remarkable thing of all was the sculptural perfection of the physique, like something carved in alabaster; most notably a pair of breasts of quite exceptional pert- and upstanding-ness.

Believe me, they would have been exceptional for any woman of any age lying on her back, but particularly, outrageously, in the case of one who was dead and in her mid sixties. Not large, but with absolutely no sag, and a perfect double-curvature, ogee profile like the cupolas of the Taj Mahal, and beautifully proportioned nipples. And before you ask, yes, they were real, there were no scars where any silicone bags had gone in."