Worth Going To Your Grave For

Alan Bennett performed two memorable monologues in the immortal revue Beyond the Fringe, which also launched the careers of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller. One was a gloriously pointless Church of England sermon ("'But my brother Esau is an hairy man and I am a smooth man' - words very meaningful end significant for arse - hyaah - togethaah - tonight"); while the other took as its subject the English way of death - quiet, modest and, where possible, cheap. The monologue incorporates several moving anecdotes, notably that of an aunt who wanted her ashes scattered at the sea-front on August Bank Holiday Monday ("'yer bloody mad,' I said; 'council won't want all them smuts blowing about - it's a smokeless zone'"); but the one which best represented those great English virtues of quiet, modesty and economy was perhaps the story of Mrs Passmore, who had her husband's ashes put into an egg timer: "She said, 'He's never done a stroke of work while he was alive - I'll be right glad to watch him now.' Of course, that's a bit unconventional."

Beyond the Fringe was written at the beginning of the sixties, with the austerities of the Second World War a recent memory. So recently faded were the glories of Empire that even some of Britain's communications media were still owned by British citizens. Britain still had more corner shops than supermarkets, the vitamins in any given piece of fruit tended to outnumber the poisons, and the Heath Service was a national embarrassment less because of financial difficulties than because it was considered by some to be a symptom of creeping Socialism. Times have changed, and the thought of putting people's ashes into egg-timers is probably not one that would occur to many of us, not least because most egg-timers nowadays are electronic and, if their internal workings are topped up with carbonised loved ones, might be prone to malfunction.

Accordingly, a Swiss company has come up with a new, very shiny and somewhat expensive method of aiding the bereaved in their refusal to let go of the past. Human ashes, when subjected to appropriate degrees of heat and pressure, will behave like most other bits of carbon and emerge as diamonds, and the company, Algordanza, charges between two and a half thousand and ten thousand pounds to perform the operation upon suitably valued relatives. A widow horrified at the idea of "the cemetery niche, the worms" has had her husband's ashes turned into a pair of heart-shaped diamond earrings. "This way I will always have him near me," she said. Now, having escaped the niche and the worms, and however pressurised he might be, he can always be certain of her sympathetic ear. A man has had his mother's ashes turned into a bluish diamond inscribed with the words Omnia mea mecum porto ("All that is mine I carry with me"), presumably so that he can carry her with him. "Having her like this, as a precious stone," he said, "has something of a relic mystical, symbolic, eternal to it." Or something of the dentist's drill, depending on one's mood.