They'll make an 'ash of it...

Southampton Crematorium have installed a Pay-Per-View system so that their funerals can be watched remotely by people in the comfort of their own homes. Supposedly it's been designed so that people who cannot attend the funeral of a loved one due to illness or being in another country. I however, think it's more sinister than that.

It's obviously a move towards attendance-free funerals driven by employers. Already in the dim and distant past are the professional mourners whose job it was to make an already sad occasion even sadder with much wailing, gnashing of teeth and waving of lacy black handkerchiefs. Then they were fired, no doubt as part of a global top-hat shortage. Now, the actual people will be prevented from attending. Well, they only get in the way, don't they? And think of the wasted man hours from employees skiving off to funerals...

There'll be teething troubles of course. Great Aunt Agnes will be scheduled for a service at 15:00. Those of us lucky enough to have a wireless broadband connection won't even have to leave work, so there's no chance of us getting stuck on the B3459 and holding the next service up. Some of us will still be on dialup or will have another problem;

'How was your Dad's funeral?'
'Don't know...'
'Why the hell not?!'
'I had a 'fatal exception error' with Windows Vista. Then, when I rebooted, it told me that I needed to upgrade to 'Funeral 2.0'.'

It's the thin end of the wedge; next it'll be a 'virtual family', where you don't ever have to leave the office...

Yawn. I'm off for a kip in the stationery cupboard.