The new crematorium

The new crematorium, a set on Flickr.

The new crematorium just outside Ipswich has been open for nearly a year and is increasingly popular. Some might say that "popular" isn't a good word for a crematorium, but since you've got to have funerals, they may as well be in a pleasant venue.

One feature is the extra-large cremator, which means that very big bodies no longer have to be driven miles from here for disposal.

They had an open day recently, to "dispel myths", where they sold cream teas to raise money for the children's hospice.

What to do with big people?

In case you were wondering, "big" is a euphemism for "fat" - very fat. There are more very fat people than ever these days, and when they die, that can cause problems.

Years ago, I knew someone who'd worked as a post-war hospital porter. He worked nights, when there weren't enough staff, and was asked to move a corpse from one of the floors above ground level when the lift wasn't working. There was no one to help him, it was a large body, so he stood at the top of a flight of stairs (concrete, with dark tiles on the walls on one side) and pondered. Reasoning that the guy was dead, so he wouldn't know anything about it, he rolled the body to the ground floor. I don't remember how he got him off the floor at the bottom. If it had been a lightweight corpse, he'd have been able to sling it over his shoulder in a fireman's lift, but it weighed at least 20 stone.

Nowadays, mortuaries, funeral directors, crematorium staff and others have to deal with corpses weighing much more than that - in some cases, over twice as heavy. In our area, none of the cremators are big enough to take very big bodies, so they have to be taken to a crematorium miles away. There are plans to build a new, privately-owned crematorium in our area, that will have an extra-large cremator. I don't suppose many people have thought about the extra cost involved with having to do this.

You read about the fire brigade being called to move hugely obese patients to hospital, but you don't hear much about what happens when they're dead.

You can't have a lovely environmentally-friendly cardboard or wicker coffin if you're hugely fat; you'd just spill out of it, like a badly wrapped parcel.

You can't be carried by pall-bearers if you're more than 20 stone; you have to be pushed on a trolley.

It's difficult to bury a fat person; you need a very big hole, and a way to lower the coffin so it doesn't just thump to the bottom.

They've had this problem in the US for longer than us, so they've been manufacturing 44" wide cremators for a while, and now we're having to import them.

Fat people cost everyone money - not just because of their healthcare problems, the difficulty of moving them from A to B when they're ill and can't walk, but because it's very expensive to dispose of their corpses when they die.

The moral? Do everyone a favour, and don't die fat.

Illustration: 18th watercolour of a fat man by G H Beaumont