Graveyards… A Criminal Waste of Space

I was taking the long walk into uni yesterday past the graveyard. And like many graveyards, it’s a hangout for muggers, rapists, heroin addicts and 'misunderstood' teens with their pale faces and fat girlfriends, when I had a thought. One of many that day. With all the people dieing in Liverpool from poor diet and gang violence, soon the graveyard will be full. This land is already surrounded by houses so you can’t extend it. So you start a new graveyard on the outskirts of Liverpool... But when the town expands soon that graveyard will have the same problem. So you keep building graveyards until the whole country is one big graveyard.

The land that the graveyard occupies is prime real estate but who the hell wants to live in a house built on a graveyard? Unless there is another war and Liverpool gets bombed to shit again, that land will forever remain unoccupied except for people who died many years ago.

So what do we do about it? As a temporary solution I suggest that we bury people in between older graves. Thus practically doubling the number of people we can squeeze into the yard. Also, coinciding with that, the government can start a tasteful advertising campaign to encourage people to have their loved ones cremated....

 Soothing voice: "Why bury them in the ground in an empty graveyard only to be eaten by worms and have their graves desecrated by drunks, when they can live in an urn right next to you.... It will be like they never left!"


 <Queue cheesy music with pictures of the family dining with the urn at the head of the table, the urn being carried by the family round the park, and the baby playing under the watchful eye of the urn>

 Little Girl: "Daddy could have been sleeping in the ground but instead he can now be here for my piano recital...HI DADDY!"

 Soothing Voice: "Isn't it better that even death cannot tear your family apart, so please... Burn your loved ones, they deserve it"

 The advert is really a work in progress, but I believe it’s a good start.

I know people are sentimental buggers so having the charred remains of a loved one isn't enough. They want a name somewhere they could visit once a year so they can remember all the good things they did together before he/she was cruelly taken from the world. I say cruelly taken but half the time the buggers have it coming. But you can’t speak ill of the dead for some reason.

So where to put this monument? You could have a hexagonal monument in the graveyard that would be about 6 feet tall, that is just full of names. Each name having an eight digit number after it. This number would be a lot like a number plate. Say 95103253. Year 95, district 103, corpse 253. Since we live in a digital age we could set up a government run database that would hold large banks of hard disks. Give each family 300meg each to put on photographs, heartfelt messages, a history of the person who died and a message board for anyone who wants to post a message about the deceased. Then everybody could view this crap on the internet or on public access terminals scattered throughout the graveyard.

Gravestone manufacturers will be a bit pissed, but it will open up a new era in web design when so many memorial pages will have to be made.

 So until my plan comes into effect I will leave you with a question...

 Your granny dies and you have to go clean out her house. Its mostly crap so you throw it straight into the bin... Except for an urn containing your grandpa’s ashes. What do you do with them? You can't throw them out so do you scatter them in the park? Or the ocean? Do you buy a bigger urn and add granny’s ashes to it then shake it up like a martini? Or maybe you just put them in the attic and let future generations decide.


 Iron Fist