A noble undertaking

I adore undertakers. Unlike dentists or buses or boyfriends, they’re always there when you need them: even if you call in the middle of the night you will be answered by a human, not an answer-phone message. Funeral directors (as they prefer to be called) are surely the only businesses in Britain never to greet a customer with the words: ‘Sorry love, we’re just closing.’ They are unfailingly courteous and full of good sense. They listen reverently while you recite your woes; like a therapist, but without the side effect of making you hate your family. In an age when even consultant surgeons dress in trainers, there is a pleasing dignity in the formality of their dress. I think of them as the equivalent of midwives, essential couriers on the journey from one world into the next.

First and foremost, they take a corpse off your hands. If, like me, you have seen your fair share of dead people, you will know how welcome is the arrival of the undertaker. It doesn’t take long for dear old Aunt Peg to morph into a convincing prop from the Hammer House of Horror. You really don’t want dead people in your living room. Or not unless you’re a serial killer admiring your handiwork, as Dennis Nilsen was wont to do.

Human bodies are not so very different from a lamb chop. (Actually, they go off much more quickly, because of being full of blood and digestive matter and offal.) But a dead human is about a thousand times the size of a cutlet. They don’t fit in a domestic fridge. If you own a chest freezer, the likelihood is that it’s already full of old lasagnes and frozen peas.