This winter it has been disruptively cold in the UK. Twenty below is darned cold for those with thin blood. But the UK’s lack of warmth is no more serious than an enormous lack of warmth in one particular area of Cyprus. For still, unbelievably, in the second decade of the third millenium there is yet another delay in building the island’s first crematorium. What a confession. What a bungle. What a shining example of the incompetence and dilatoriness of government. Its ministers couldn’t administer the last rites to a dead Pope. It is utterly insane that Cyprus has two international airports, broadband internet almost island-wide, 30 different kinds of bread in its supermarkets, 4,000 restaurants and 10,000 souvenir shops peddling cheap tourotrash manufactured in a sweatshop somewhere in Mumbai, yet still has no crematorium.
Squeezed for burial space, graves are now being crammed in cheek by jowl and bodies are buried on top of others already interred, the uppermost, to my utter horror, far too close to the surface for safety. It sounds almost too gross to report but my gardener does an occasional spot of moonlighting at a nearby graveyard. He tells me that nowadays not only do you have to have a friend in the organisation even to book a place, but some areas of his graveyard are neglected by workers because they smell so badly.
Now let me point out that if odours can escape then so can possibly pathological micro-organisms. As with so many examples of laissez faire in Cyprus no-one seems to be bothered about and certainly no-one seems to be doing anything about the potential nightmare lurking just offstage. It’s a good thing, perhaps, that news of this deplorable state of affairs has not yet reached the greater European tourist press.
Meanwhile, we learn, some priests or other have spoken out against the construction of proper cremation facilities on the preposterous basis that it can impair the individual’s process of entering Heaven. What, one is forced to ask, can a priest possibly know about the technique of sneaking through the pearly gates? He’s just another human as ignorant as the rest of us.
Furthermore, if priests really knew anything about the techniques and requirements for getting into Heaven I suspect that the back-stabbing savagery of episcopal events just a year or so back would have been very differently conducted. What can one say in the face of such medieval claptrap? Nothing, except, perhaps, that older folks had better try to delay things a little, or form a nice orderly queue on the left.
For pity’s sake, and the sake of simple public health needs, let us howl at the leadership and its incompetent minions who’ve not the guts to get this vital requirement started PDQ. Shame on you all!
