L'IL OLE MO(A)NA ME

Is it the best of museums, is it the worst of museums? It is certainly the quirkiest of museums!

I visited Hobart's new and much lauded MONA (Museum of Old & New Art) on Monday. Actually I visited it on Sunday, but that isn't as alliterative. Mid long weekend, with an extra injection of tourists because of the volcanic ash cloud, we should have expected queues. What we didn't expect was that they would be longer at the coffee shop than for admission! Just an aside on the cafe industry in Hobart, it is best to phone ahead if there are more than 4 of you. Large numbers of paying customers upset the staff. They make this clear by being disdainful or agitated or both.

Any way, we posted two of our outrageously huge group of 7 in the entry queue and went to order takeaway coffee. In the next 20 minutes our advance party twice relinquished the opportunity to enter MONA to stand in the brisk breeze awaiting their cappuccinos.

MONA - popular!

Visitors are admitted in lots of 14 so again, when we reached the head of the queue, we and our scouts stood back until we could proceed en masse. Inside we were given an orientation talk by one of MONA's youthful staff to the effect that there is no signage in the museum, you use a touch screen MP3 player and headset to locate yourself and access information about the exhibits. You relinquish these when you leave so forgive the lack of any identifying details about the art and artists in this post*.

I have been able to find little online about the building, its site or history but a security guard told us that a European immigrant planted a vineyard on the land (at Berriedale, beside the Derwent) some time in the 20thC, that in the 1980s a house designed by the 'architect of the National Gallery of Victoria' (guess that could be Roy Grounds, Mario Bellini or Peter Davidson & Donald Bates) was built and that MONA's impressive central chimney/spiral staircase structure is part of the original house. At some point all that became the property of enigmatic billionaire David Walsh who has excavated around and under the house to create his subterranean 'anti-museum' or 'subversive adult Disneyland'!

Crikey's coverage of MONA's opening in January 2011 emphasised that the museum echoes Walsh's Darwinianism and belief in life's essential randomness. We all experience, but generally fail to confront, at least in a public gallery, just a few constants i.e. that 'we seek sex, we defecate and we all die'. MONA, with its mixed media, un-labelled, un-chronological exhibits that include Egyptian mummies, taxidermied and skeletal animal remains and a simulated giant human digestive tract certainly make these shared facts inescapable.

Descending 3 floors from the ground level entry to the basement, where it is suggested you begin your tour, juggling your MP3 player and headphones (and in my case your spectacles as well) you notice two more beverage/food outlets whose existence causes you, appropriately enough, to begin an acknowledgement of randomness that will continue for hours to come.

MONA is almost totally underground. That means that there is no natural light. It has an eccentric floor plan and a feeling of being outside time, disorientation sets in quickly. This arguably puts you in the right frame of mind one of the first installations you encounter, a version of Roselands' raindrop fountain propelled into the nihilistic 21stC with the words like "mafia", "Jesse James" and "American Idol" forming in its cascades.

Nearby, between heavy burgundy velvet curtains, is a stuffed raven suspended over a real or reproduction 18thC cabinet containing an urn of human ashes - my MP3 player said human hair was also involved but I couldn't spot any unless it was of a Rapunzel-like strength and supporting the raven.

Then I was mesmerised by a video depicting a young woman undergoing various ophthalmic, surgical, immersive and electronic procedures in a kind of laboratory/conservatory/natural history museum setting - later another woman dismembered a piano and another showed great flexibility on a trapeze. The imagery recalled Paul Delvaux and Louis Bunuel. I would like to have made a note of whose work I was viewing and to record a reaction a little more complex than 'LOVE'/'HATE' but my full hands, the limitations of the MP3's programming and, I'm sure, Mr Walsh's intentions, made that impossible.

The diversity and unorthodox juxtaposition of works I saw over the next 2 hours proved both exhilarating and frustrating. The no signage policy meant I completely missed a Brett Whiteley painting in one of the only parts of the gallery with natural light. I stumbled upon a Russian video triptych quoting mannerist paintings and delivering a truly poignant and chilling Armageddon message. I loved that (and could tick 'LOVE' in all conscience) and also a work I have since heard is called 'Cunts and Other Conversations' which comprised casts of over 100 sets of female genitals. I didn't ever find the much publicised excreting digestive tract or any animal carcasses which form exciting parts of the MONA collection.

MONA is must see. It is very probably unique; there are some amazing exhibits with promises of additions and changes to come. I'm over 50 and do not consider myself a complete luddite. I did however struggle with the touch screen MP3 player as I hadn't used one before and found the earphones competed with the MP3's lanyard about my neck. I only remembered to consult the floor plan when I found a stray copy on the floor towards the end of my visit. I know I was being conceptually challenged and asked to experience art in a fresh way without curatorial interpretation but I can't discard my existing art knowledge and wanted to make connections. I would also rather put my energy into experiencing the art itself rather than into trying to operate the technology. I kept thinking of the Powerhouse where technology is used more sparingly and is much more interactive and user friendly. I don't know what they do for people with actual disabilities but the glasses on, glasses off thing I had to do to find out where I was and what I was looking at was an effing pain.

You can't see the collection in one day nor is it desirable to, but I do feel a bit as if I have only rehearsed for my visit and now need to have the real experience. As our departure from Tassie was not delayed by the ash cloud that opportunity won't come for some time.

Really keen to hear what others who've visited MONA have to say.

*Post script - I am informed I could have saved my tour and tracked it later. Oh, well, I'll know for next time.

Everything more is more again in Dusseldorf!

It's Eurovision time again. We just watched the second night's broadcast, billed as the semi finals. The finals are on SBS 1 tomorrow night (15 May). Last year Eurovision was disappointingly bland but this year the excess and tenuous musicianship we have come to love were back in spades! Here is a run down of some of the acts that made the biggest impression.

There is always a strong soft porn aesthetic to the pop music business and Eurovision presents its own special version. Maja Keuc of Slovenia went the bondage/thigh high boot route with her costume for 'No One' (or 'No Win' as I prefer to think of it) and had a group of girl backing singers that look like a Supré window display come to life. One of these young ladies appears to be adjusting herself in the pic above.

Former (1998) Israeli winner transsexual Dana International seemed a strong contender when her song 'Ding Dong' was announced, standing as it does in a long line of silly Eurovision song titles: 'Boom Bang-a-Bang' (UK, 1969), 'A-Ba-Ni-Ba' (Israel, 1978), 'Bana Bana' (Turkey, 1989) and 'Bourn Badaborun' (Monaco, 1967). Perhaps on reflection though the choice of consonant may be ill advised. Any way the song, her performance and couture were so dull (see below) that they made one long for Fran Drescher's sense of style and vocal projection!

From Romania came Hotel FM with their clicky, clappy, catchy 'Change' a contender despite its un-Eurovision defeatist lyric 'I can't change the world alone'. We liked their Romanian pianist much more than their English lead singer so here (below) is the only picture I could find which shows he snacks healthily as well as vamping appealingly.



Almost all the songs we heard tonight were sung in English which I know is often contentious in the competing countries. But it matters little as most lyrics were incomprehensible any way. Thank goodness for SBS's Julia Zemiro and Sam Pang and their elucidating commentary.

Each song's title at least was generally left ringing in the ears. This was definitely so with the subtle 'I Love Belarus' (yes, Belarus's entry), Moldova's quirky 'So Lucky', Ireland's 'Lipstick' and Estonia's Rockerfeller Street. Rockerfeller Street was performed by 18 year old Getter Jaani (left), she is delightful, can really wear magenta and started her performance with a magic trick. The number's art direction was pretty cool using a graphic model cityscape, perhaps a bit too cool to be real Eurovision material - don't recall many lighting effects or pyrotechinics at all.

Irish entrant Jedward are twins John and Edward Grimes. They are very BOUNCY, suggesting Father Ted's Ardal O'Hanlon on acid. Their personal stylist clearly disdains gravity and has an open ended budget for hair spray. The way this hyperenergetic, Warholesque pair perform Lipstick is described quite accurately in Wikipedia as 'a dayglo wad of electroglammy bubblegum' (I'd love to credit that but Wikipedia didn't). They are a lot of fun and are through to the finals. Also high in the quirky stakes is Moldova's Zdob si Zdub with 'So Lucky' - their usual pub rock image altered by donning tall hats which the Eurovision website calls 'cosmic antennae' but looked more as if they came straight from the gnome section at the Garden Centre. However their ska influenced song and their unerring unicycling made them one of this year's more memorable acts!

While members of Zdob si Zdub were prepared, for their art's sake, to look as if home was Dingly Dell, we saw no costumes as grotesque as those of 2008's winner Finnish Heavy metal band Lordi's. Remember them? Sort of dinosuar bikers!

Pretty boy and barbie doll lead singers did abound however. Macedonia's Vlatko Ilievski is right out of a menswear catalogue but our focus readily wandered from his chiseled profile in disbelief to his stumbling Zorba-style backing dancers one of whom inserted an accordion solo seemingly randomly into the performance. More twins, female this time, from Slovakia teetered on 8 inch heels, the wind machine causing their golden tresses to play about their even more golden fake tanned shoulders and cleavages. Despite the fact that their song contained only 5 notes the girls managed to avoid all of them!

I could go on but I am spoilt for choice (and we only saw a fraction of the acts, go to http://www.eurovision.tv/ for the full catastrophe). There was the impressive lap of honour, guitar in hand and presumably still being strummed, done by one of the 3Js, boarding school pupils from the Netherlands who've formed a boy band. (Maybe some sort of Chariots of Fire homage?). There was Ukranian Mika Newton replete in angels wings, singing, appropriately enough, Angel, whilst projected behind her were images of pathos trickled from the hand of 'sand artist' Kseniia Simonovia. There was Musiqq from Latvia comprising a chubby boy (I think he is only 17) and an early Elvis Costello look alike - the ill fitting waistcoats there wore looked vaguely better on the Elvis clone. And did I glimpse the Swedish soubrette suffer a tiny wardrobe malfunction a la Janet Jackson towards the end of her act?

Definitely a return to form by the teeming mass of celebrity wannabes and pop chart hopefuls from the northern hemisphere. The electricity bill for special effects and online voting (or 'woting' as one of the Dusseldorf anchors referred to it) would take about 1,000 earth hours to offset and the ostentation of makeup and costuming on display means that none of us need ever feel overdressed again! And the winner is... who knows or cares? Eurovision has already delivered.

Jedward, like Ardal O'Hanlon on acid.

Stop Press: Ell/Nikki from Azerbaijan has won the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest with 221 points (pronounced 'pwants'). We didn't see this entry last night so just Googled the You Tube clip which begins with a lot of 'ooh, ooh' noises and a Golden retriever leaving the set. We know how the dog felt!

Ellis massively unreconstructed

Bob Ellis and I are in disagreement. I usually have a lot of time for the old grouch with his loverly libertarian values and his delicious turns of phrase. But Mr Ellis, Bob, M*A*S*H, I Love Lucy and Hepburn-Tracey movies are not real life. They are not the appropriate paradigm for making a judgement about gender politics or ethics within the armed forces. They are in fact the very opposite of an analysis of these things in that they are creative products which deliberately treat some of the more fraught aspects of the human condition with humour and optimism.

Comments in your Drum article on the recent ADF Sex Scandal are really sloppy thinking. You seem to claim that because sexist behaviour has been a constant in society and the army, a female cadet who finds herself filmed in a private act of sex, who did not give her consent for that act to be broadcast and humiliatingly distributed and who is then further publicly embarrassed with an ill-timed unrelated disciplinary hearing should content herself with tearful phone call to Mum and then just get over it.

Perhaps it has escaped you, Bob, but we accord different levels of approbation to men and women when they are caught en flagrante. Whatever advances feminism may have made, a twenty something young woman stands to lose a whole lot more in terms of self respect, the respect of others, credibility, confidence, the ability to pursue her career (the list goes on) if she is at the centre of an event like this than do male footballers, cadets, entertainers and sundry 'larrikins'! It is not, to coin a cliche, a level playing field.

On this topic, your heart and mind are closed and your arguments are glib. Must try harder.

Growing middle-aged disgracefully?

On a day when I have made the words 'hornier' and 'jism' in 2 separate (online) Scrabble games I am wondering what my vocabulary reveals about my unconscious. My family still treasures the serendipitous juxtaposition of 'anal' and 'splurges' in one of our Scrabble games some 3 decades ago. Who doesn't enjoy the occasional smutty word in Scrabble? The thing is, I have been having erotic dreams too. Quite graphic. Almost every night. And I managed to offend my peers at book group this weekend by mentioning the (supposedly) African maternal practice of sucking the snot out of a baby's nostrils to aid grooming and assist the infant to breath easy.

Does my lack of inhibition challenge ideas of propriety? I ask (rhetorically).

I was a very proper child (in the UK) in the 60s. I wore gloves and went to Sunday school. I didn't say the word 'damn' until I was eleven. I was desperately looking for my school shoes and my total recall of the exact context in which I uttered this profanity is proof of my immediate sense of self reproach. Even at fifteen, circa 1971, I thought if any man saw a mole about 5 cm above my cleavage we would be duty bound to marry.

Then there was the 1980s when I became a vigilante for feminism and social re-engineering and completely failed to notice when I was being flirted with and missed a lot of other subtle human interaction that makes life a joy.

How have I evolved into a fairly forthright, even libertarian middle-aged woman? (Rhetorical again). Well obviously experience changes our perceptions and alters our thresholds. There has been quite a bit of water under the bridge since my pious girlhood: love, lust, birth, death, encounters with all manner of achievements and addictions, my own and others'. Stuff like that makes its mark, and not in a bad way (take note, Pontiff). I still define myself as someone who generally wishes the human race well and upholds its rights and dignity. However my recipe has changed. I now believe in harm minimisation and Buddhist style non attachment. That probably sounds as rigid and joyless as my 1980s doctrines. What I actually mean is I no longer think the perfection of society is possible or even desirable, humans can be both magnificent and frail, we can not change this by endless regulation and we can not project our own yearnings and ideals onto others and expect anything but bewilderment and disappointment.

That is probably why I didn't experience the royal wedding as fairytale made flesh and I am not cock-a-hoop that Osama Bin Laden has been killed in a slick US military operation.

I do like a larf though and as well as Princess Beatrice's hat, a concept aired in one of my Uni lectures has tickled my fancy this week. I got the giggles when I heard about an organisational theorist, Gabriele Lakomski, who looks to birds' flocking behaviour and termites' mound creation as evidence of 'epiphenomenon' i.e. the false appearance of led or directed behaviour that parallels what occurs in organistaions within human society. Now is it just me, or is even what goes on at City Rail or Maccas a bit more complicated than following a pheremone trail and trying not to bump into your peers? That one's rhetorical too.

Anyway time for repose. I wonder what's on the soft core porn channel tonight?

Below: naughty postcards another shame of my youth and delight of my later years

Above: Jo Brand - I love her to bits and think 'Getting On' is the epitome of grown up complex telly!

School's In

The last few months have been an education. Or more accurately, they have been an experiment in education. At some point late last year I got the notion that the abandoned/thwarted ambition of my teen years of teaching secondary English and Art needed to be rekindled. I made enquiries with the Arts/Social Sciences/Education faculties of numerous universities, applied to 4, got offered places by 3, rejected any distance/online program as inappropriate for learning to teach actual live adolescents and enrolled in the Graduate Diploma in Education at the University of NSW.


My first day was at the height of the late February humidity. At about 10 am I wedged my Magna in between 2 other cars in the only remaining space in St Peters in a narrow street outside a council works depot I never knew existed and walked to the bus stop. Despite an ice cold bus ride to Kensington the weather was so muggy my hair didn't dry all that day. Also, despite wearing my Dr Martens adjustable air cushioned sole sandals, I got blisters. I didn't get a chance to have coffee until after midday and when I did, it and the accompanying sandwich were 30% dearer than they are in Haymarket where I work. My daughter's school counsellor rang me on my way to afternoon lectures. I heard the words 'scaffolding' and 'focci' more times in 24 hours than I had heard them in the preceding 53 years. By 7 pm when my day concluded, I had severe misgivings about the choice I had made. I was a good 25 years older than even the oldest of my fellow students, and about 15 years older than most of my lecturers. None of my peers seemed to be trying to work while studying (except maybe as casual waiters). The lecture on adolescent cognition and identity completely replicated my discoveries as a parent and from reading Barbara Strauch's Why Are They So Weird? What's Really Going on in a Teenager's Brain. The compulsory 6 weeks of prac teaching would put the kybosh on plans for my husband's 60th and my sister's 50th! You get my drift.

That night I became convinced I had made a mistake. I had a sleepless night unlike any I had experienced for ages. I got up at 3 am to look on the UNSW's website to see what other courses I could do via the School of Education. By dawn I had a plan. I would see if I could transfer to the Masters of Educational Leadership - a course that described itself as suitable for someone working in the educational field in a school or 'other organisation'. To cut to the chase, I un-enrolled in all my learn to be a teacher subjects and am now 7 weeks into 'Evaluation of Educational Programs' and 'Leadership Theories & Practice'. In these classes I am only 20 years older than the oldest of my peers, only about 15 years older than one of my lecturers and only about 5 years older than the other. I have heard the words 'scaffolding' and 'focci' a mere once each, but do feel a little over exposed to words and concepts such as 'efficacy', 'triangulation', 'outputs' vs 'outcomes', 'rigour', 'robustness' and 'validity'. I can apply what I am learning to my work without too much of a stretch but am constantly struck by the gulf between the ideas of evaluation and leadership refined and pored over in academic discourse and the rough and ready practices of the state public sector. I find the level of detail you are required to absorb and regurgitate to prove you can do something to a university standard at odds with what my commonsense and my many years of experience tells me will work.

I have just handed in my first 2 assignments and am yet to find out how I went. (Thinks: hope my lecturers don't dicover my blog). I am enjoying exercising my brain and the extra time with my family and at the pool that part-time work affords me. I do a fraction of the reading set because it is distressingly serious and boring and I don't want to sit down for as many hours a week as work, lectures and doing ALL the reading would require. I am already rethinking whether I want to persevere with the Masters Ed at UNSW or to see if I can transfer to UTS's Master of Adult Ed in 2nd semester. It looks as if I may be terminally dilettantish and restless but I will have to design a logic model describing the sequences of my behaviour identifying expected short, medium and long term outputs and design an intervention to test whether these in fact contribute to a desired outcome if I am to expect to be published in any reputable journal. Thank god for me blog!

The Summer Knows...

Observations on Sydney summer 1 month and 4 days into 2011…

Weather: Does anyone actually like this stifling heat? Temperatures in Sydney have been up to 41 degrees and doing even the most rudimentary things is stressful, inelegant and exhausting. It is scandalous that ANY un-air-conditioned trains are scheduled at peak hour. The fact that we had one cooler day that coincided with Opera in the Domain is a miracle for which I am highly appreciative. Carmen was wonderful!

Contemplating starting uni in late February- if this heat persists - fills me with horror. Perhaps all tute rooms and lecture theatres are air-conditioned these days. They weren’t in the early 80s. Motivation to go to my aquarobics classes is NOT a problem.

Surely the climate change warnings are being proved frighteningly right? Extreme weather in the form of floods and a cyclone has hit Queensland. The citizenry are copping a beating but why is EVERYTHING reported on and mulled over to the enth degree? A guy at work told me his cousin was cleaning up his property in regional Qld after Yasi hit when a Channel 9 crew poked a microphone under his nose. He told them to ‘fuck off’. What an excellent response to the voyeuristic, prurient hacks! If only others weren't so set on their 5 minutes of fame.

Fashion: What is it with those pants some young people are wearing with the crotch at approximately knee level? They look like they are wearing a nappy that is long overdue for changing. The maxi dress has made a comeback and for the most part looks cool and comfortable however spaghetti straps are not for everyone. It turns out that 'budgie smugglers' have not been completely eradicated (blame Tony Abbott); they still seem to be the swimwear of choice for some over 5os men. Sad, sad, sad.

The heat interferes with one's grooming

Reading: What a joy to read David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice straight after Christmas! Every review I'd read said Sedaris makes you guffaw in public. They were so right. His account of working as an elf at Macys is hilarious. The day he and the other elven brethren realised 'satan' was an anagram of 'santa' and started urging the queuing customers to 'step this way to see satan' or reminded them to 'thank satan for the Baby Born he gave you last year' makes side splitting reading. I have just received his Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim from the US. Will try to defer opening it until I have finished the letters of the combined Mitford sisters which are a joy of another kind.

Socialising: At two gatherings I have been to my hosts have been gracious enough to train a fan on me out of doors. It was the only way I could cope with the heat. Sizzling one's steak and snags on a barbecue though is cruel and unusual punishment in 30 degrees plus! The cold collation comes into its own in summer. While lumps of protein have fried, tempers have flared. My book group has fractured. Characters have been analysed with little or no charity. Reproaches and ultimatums have been published online. It is all very wearying. In a heatwave where effort is required to do almost anything such bickering is a powerful disincentive to retain my membership. A few 5 Seeds ciders or a nice bottle of Screaming Pig or Sacred Stone with friends at the pub is however a very pleasant way to pass the time!

Telly: When it's been bad it's been very, very bad but when it is good it still gets me in. Enjoyment has been had with Robbie Coltrane in Murderland, everyone in Ashes to Ashes and with the return of Big Love. QI is almost always a hoot. Looking forward to the new Matt Lucas and David Walliams series Come Fly With Me.

This is blog lite. Hard to be profound when it is hot enough in here to boil a monkey's bum in here, your majesty!

Next post: surrogacy, cancer and conduct at work! Please follow.

Not fade away

The Death of St. Joseph, c. 1740, Piazzetta Giambattista. (St Joseph, Jesus's earthly dad, is the patron saint of peaceful death and of anti-communism)

What does it mean to 'make a good death'? Media reports state that Dame Joan Sutherland 'died peacefully in the early hours of (the) morning after suffering a long illness' and that she 'died at home with her husband, conductor Richard Bonynge, and son Adam at her side'. She was 83 and appeared to have achieved all her ambitions. She died at home with those she loved around her. She had been able to convey her wishes to her family about the kind of funeral she wanted and (not surprisingly) the music she would like at the funeral.

It would appear that Dame Joan's death met many (and may have met all) of the British Medical Association's Principles for a Good Death:

• To know when death is coming, and to understand what can be expected.
• To be able to retain control of what happens.
• To be afforded dignity and privacy.
• To have control over pain relief and other symptom control.
• To have choice and control over where death occurs (at home or elsewhere).
• To have access to information and expertise of whatever kind is necessary.
• To have access to any spiritual or emotional support required.
• To have access to hospice care in any location, not only in hospital.
• To have control over who is present and who shares the end.
• To be able to issue advance directives which ensure wishes are respected.
• To have time to say goodbye, and control over other aspects of timing.
• To be able to leave when it is time to go, and not to have life prolonged pointlessly.

How many deaths meet these criteria? None in our family has. It is just not possible that a hospital, however humane, will be sufficiently attuned to each individual patient's decline to alert family members in time for them to make it to the bedside for their final moments. I heard too late to be at my grandmother's bedside and got to my mother's about half an hour after getting the call with the news. To die at home may be a fond wish for many of us, however, dying at home alone and lying undiscovered for days as my Dad did is a godawful way to go.

Knowing when death is coming and understanding what to expect implies a level of acceptance. My mother and my mother in law both felt angry and cheated to know that death was imminent when they, at 65 and 72 respectively, still had a few things left to do and were not ready to leave their friends and families.

Then there are the suicides - my grandfather and my brother. Maximum control over the circumstances and means of their deaths, exercising the ultimate in pain and symptom control but completely bereft of dignity and support.

In his 1951 poem Do not go gentle into that good night Dylan Thomas urged his father/us:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan beseeches his dying father, and by extension all of us, to express our indignation at death and to leave an indelible impression of our vitality with those left behind. Not for him reclining in the arms of Jesus and Mary and fading away as St Joseph is depicted as doing.

As an atheist, the modern tendency to celebrate a life at a funeral rather than to seek comfort by proclaiming the existence of continuing meta existence in some ethereal hereafter obviously appeals to me. But the new ceremonial is by no means send off 'lite'. I was at funeral recently that was planned and conducted in difficult circumstances. It was another died at home unexpectedly and not discovered for some time situation. The police were involved, an autopsy performed and an inquest required. The person himself was reclusive, moody and obsessive and had had fallings out with several friends and family members. He was also a committed gardener and environmentalist, the compassionate rescuer of a stray dog and a custodian of our local history. In his eulogy the dead man's brother did not omit references to his some of his prickly qualities but his words and the reminiscences he invited other's to contribute all struck a note that was both tender and reverent to the man's memory and that truly celebrated the value of all life. To be one of that gathering was to feel a sense of community, of human connection and of wonder at what can be contained in this 'brief hour in which we strut and fret upon the stage and then (are) heard no more'.

The ideal of a 'good death' is a rarely realised. The good marking of a passing is eminently achievable.

LOL cats remind us of the reverence with which most aspects of life (and death) should be treated.

Footnote: Not only was Dylan Thomas anti death with good grace, he was, according to Socialism Today (the monthly newsletter of the Socialist Party of England & Wales) 'a thinker with a grounding in Marxism, and a self-proclaimed revolutionary socialist'! Perhaps Thomas is a candidate to become the patron (anti) saint of wealth redistribution and shamelessly shambolic death? Weren't his own last words: 'I've just had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that's the record'?