Go up in smoke

[Flashermac]

Send up your ashes with fireworks say British funeral modernizers

 

 

London (DPA) - If you want fireworks at your funeral or your coffin to be be placed on a motorcycle sidecar, Britain is the place to do it.

 

 

An exhibition in Exeter, south-west Britain, featured a range of less traditional ways of bidding farewell to the dead, ranging from the use of motorbikes to shooting ashes into the sky.

 

Among the exhibitors in the Return to Sender section was the Reverend Paul Sinclair, founder of Motorcycle Funerals, which runs sidecar hearses in place of traditional vehicles.

 

Sinclair, a Pentecostal minister from Derbyshire, central Britain, believes that the approach to funerals by the Christian Churches is "overly narrow."

 

"As well as having religion, most people have other lifestyles," he said.

 

Churches needed to realise that when any funerals held should not be on the basis of faith alone, but should also be relevant to a person's lifestyle.

 

"Take a man who rode motorbikes in the war, then came home and rode into retirement. If you put him in a car, his lifestyle has been completely ignored," said Sinclair.

 

"No-one submits a Catholic to a Muslim service or places a Liverpool football fan in an Arsenal shirt when they die - so why should people who love bikes be last seen in an automobile?"

 

Another less conventional method of bidding farewell to the deceased is the use of fireworks to send ashes into the night sky, the exhibition showed.

 

"We have the wrong approach to death," said Fergus Jamieson, managing director of Heavens Above Fireworks.

 

"People cry tears of joy at the end of our firework displays."

 

Thirty-six such funerals, costing between 900 pounds (1,800 dollars) and 1,800 pounds, have so far taken place in Britain - none with the blessing of a Christian minister