Earth to earth (again)...

It seems that my recent posts have tended to be about the third of the clergy services of ‘hatch, match and dispatch’. I’m sorry about that and hope to balance things up a bit in future but here is another one concerned with dispatch. One of the more interesting, and probably memorable, things in the diary is an exhumation and re-burial. Has anyone out there in cyberland any experience of this procedure? The process is carefully explained in detail in the letter of permission to do this but one hears things: someone knows someone whose best friend’s mother-in-law… – you know the sort of hearsay that comes back. If it’s true then I am not at all sure that it is something to be looked forward to, except for the training aspect. Permission to move a burial is not easy to get apparently and most funeral directors and clergy have never been asked to carry out the procedure. Not so much as ‘see one, do one, teach one’ but ‘do one, teach one’ all at the same time. Goodness knows what liturgy one uses…
It’s something else that they don’t tell you about at college. Along with how many clerical shirts to buy – to which, from experience, the answer is rather more than you think that you will need. I wear one most days and so far have tried out five of the seven I bought. Unless you know that you are going to a curacy where clerical dress is not worn, then you probably need long and short sleeved shirts, and maybe in a couple of colours (depending on your churchmanship) and then it is one on, one clean and one in the wash. Is the fabric to be cotton, polycotton, peach finish acetate, T shirt interlock, silk mixture…? What sort of collar: tab, tunnel or slip in, standard, ‘Father Ted’ Roman style (smart and surprisingly comfortable), white 360 degree collar? And, until you wear one for real, you don’t really know what is comfortable, what doesn’t make you feel as if you are choking or as if you want to throw up. Which, come to think of it, might just be a good excuse at an exhumation…