Rest in Peace
I enjoyed this article from the latest edition of Private Eye - the UK's best and only fortnightly satirical magazine which reminded me of the famous old saying - all's well that ends well.
FUNNY OLD WORLD
COMPILED BY VICTOR LEWIS-SMITH
The priest usually says 'ashes to ashes', funeral director Margaret Eckbo told reporters in Oslo, 'but ashes to plastic' doesn't sound nearly as good.
"Every Norwegian gets a free cemetery plot for twenty years when they die, then the plot becomes available to bury someone else. The system generally works well, but from the 1930s until the 1960s, Norwegians routinely wrapped dead bodies in plastic before burying them in wooden caskets, believing the practice was more sanitary."
"Plastic-wrapped bodies don't decompose, and the law forbids us to reuse those graves, so we're running out of space to bury people, because land is farce in Oslo, and politicians aren't keen on giving it to dead people. You could say that wrapping people in plastic was the result of a some pretty poor planning."
Fortunately a solution to the problem has been found by Kjell Larsen Ostbye, a former graveyard worker. "I calculated that by poking holes in the ground right through the plastic, and then injecting a lime-based solution into a corpse, the body would decompose within a year, allowing the grave to be reused."
"The city of Oslo agreed to pay me $670 per grave, so I created a business called Norsk Miljostab-ilisering, and have so far performed the process on 17,000 plastic-wrapped graves, out of an estimated total of 350,000. It makes some people uncomfortable when they find out what I'm doing, but one has to assume the corpses don't feel anything. The plastic thing was obviously a mistake, and we all want things to end in the natural way, don't we?"
Wall Street Journal, 11/10/13. Spotter: Helen
