At Last, Newcastle win something

[Happy Face 29]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2392694.html

 

 

THE Chinese might revere their ancestors but they also worship the money to be made from chipping out cheap tombstones for the British market.

 

Take the solid granite Toon shirt illustrated here, complete with solid stone football flower vase. The widow of a devoted Newcastle United supporter could never have afforded such an elaborate and personal memorial until China muscled in on the British gravestone market with cheap granite and low labour costs.

 

Lesley McGuinness, 38, lost her husband, a former Coldstream Guardsman and devoted follower at St James’s Park, to cancer last year. A local mason told her that she could have a 3ft, half-tonne, hand-carved memorial for little more than £2,000, thanks to Chinese suppliers who would provide cheap, good-quality granite and carry out the basic carving for a fraction of British prices. She placed the order, and now her husband’s stone has won the gravestone industry’s award for Most Original Memorial of the Year.

 

Simon Richmond, of the Newcastle-based family company of Joseph Richmond and Son, said most of the basic work was done in China; he had merely finished it off.

 

“In China, the labour costs are much cheaper and the stone is abundant,” Mr Richmond said yesterday. “The quality is fantastic and we just add the finishing touches. If I had to have that football shirt made in England it would have cost at least £5,000.”

 

According to Mr Richmond, traditional memorials in plain shape bearing only the name of the departed are now little more than one-fifth of his business. “Football is a religion in Newcastle; I sell more gravestones with footballs on them than with Jesus.”

 

Other unusual memorials to his credit include a golf ball headstone and he is currently working on a black granite headstone in the shape of a motorcycle on a ramp, with black glass chippings to imitate tarmac, and road markings picked out in white marble.

 

“The last thing we want is cemeteries looking like war graves, with row upon row of identical gravestones,” Mr Richmond said, somewhat contentiously, “We are all individuals in life, and memorials should be no different.”

 

Mrs McGuinness said that when her husband died, aged 39, the family had not planned a burial — until they saw what could be done. “I was shown the Newcastle shirt and I said, I don’t care how much it costs, I want that one.”

 

Keith Rackham, outgoing president of the National Association of Memorial Masons, said: “We accept that not everyone will want a multicoloured football shirt, but there are now wonderful opportunities for people to consider their own kind of memorial. It’s more personal. With PCs available to everyone, people can almost design their own memorial.”

 

Brett Ainsworth, who runs a company based in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, importing Chinese gravestones, said: “It started off as virtually nothing, and now it’s more than half our business. We have noticed a massive change in favour of these more novel memorials. We had a few teething problems at first — like getting carvings of Jesus and Mary with Chinese faces — but we’ve ironed these out now.”

 

Tim Morris, chief executive of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, said his members had no complaints about the novelty headstones provided they did not cause offence.

 

At least the grieving relatives, as they admire their elaborate Chinese sculptures, will not have to agree with John Keats’s epitaph on his plain tombstone in Rome: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

 

But if the elaborate headstones suddenly go out of fashion, the descendants had better heed Shakespeare’s inscription on his Stratford headstone: “Blest be the man that spares these stones, and curst be he that moves my bones.”

 

When a future generation tires of such graveyard gimmickry, they are more likely to find the reason for its existence in the thoughts of Confucius: “The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.”

[Lazarus 0]

Wont be long before its pinched.

[Thompson 0]

It'll probs rot when it rains on it, if its been done on the cheap!

[Toonraider 0]

well each to their own, but its looks abit tacky to me, nothing wrong with the idea of having something toon related mind, but i just dont like that.

[Gemmill 44110]

It's pigging awful.

[Toonraider 0]

It's pigging awful.

 

well yes, i could have put it like that, thank you

[adios 717]

I'm having one; how much would it cost to have a movement sensor that plays "Shearer, Shearer!" and the St James' roar blasted out of a loud-speaker, every time a mourner walks within 15 feet of it?

 

Anything to disrupt the sanctity of death tbh.

[Gemmill 44110]

I'm having one; how much would it cost to have a movement sensor that plays "Shearer, Shearer!" and the St James' roar blasted out of a loud-speaker, every time a mourner walks within 15 feet of it?

 

Anything to disrupt the sanctity of death tbh.

 

"Pogo if you like my grave" tbh.

[Sima 0]

I'd say having a headstone like that deserves death but it's a bit too late for that so I'll just cringe at the utter mongness instead.

[Papa Lazaru 0]

I'm having one; how much would it cost to have a movement sensor that plays "Shearer, Shearer!" and the St James' roar blasted out of a loud-speaker, every time a mourner walks within 15 feet of it?

 

Anything to disrupt the sanctity of death tbh.

 

"Pogo if you like my grave" tbh.

 

How about, "You're not breathing anymore" or is that too much

[Dr Kenneth Noisewater 0]

I'm having one; how much would it cost to have a movement sensor that plays "Shearer, Shearer!" and the St James' roar blasted out of a loud-speaker, every time a mourner walks within 15 feet of it?

 

Anything to disrupt the sanctity of death tbh.

 

"Pogo if you like my grave" tbh.

 

How about, "You're not breathing anymore" or is that too much

He's here,

He's here,

He's always fucking here,

Dads corpse, Dads corpse.

[Gemmill 44110]

[snakehips 0]

'Lids off if you love the Toon'

 

or

 

'Come an' cadaver go if you think you're hard enough'

 

 

 

Je suis wept!

[Papa Lazaru 0]

"Sing when you're living, you only sing when you're living"

[Radgina 1]

'Lids off if you love the Toon'

 

or

 

'Come an' cadaver go if you think you're hard enough'

 

 

 

Je suis wept!

 

[Guest Toplass-101]

'Lids off if you love the Toon'

 

or

 

'Come an' cadaver go if you think you're hard enough'

 

 

 

Je suis wept!

 

 

Tell me Mam me Mam, I wont be home for tea.

[Papa Lazaru 0]

'Lids off if you love the Toon'

 

or

 

'Come an' cadaver go if you think you're hard enough'

 

 

 

Je suis wept!

 

 

Tell me Mam me Mam, I wont be home for tea.

 

Tell me Mam me Mam, I wont be home for tea

They've recently buried me

Tell me mam me mam

[Radgina 1]

'Lids off if you love the Toon'

 

or

 

'Come an' cadaver go if you think you're hard enough'

 

 

 

Je suis wept!

 

 

Tell me Mam me Mam, I wont be home for tea.

 

Tell me Mam me Mam, I wont be home for tea

They've recently buried me

Tell me mam me mam

 

[Meenzer 15347]

A collective at all of the above.

[Guest Patrokles]

That was my dad. Thanks guys.