Rising cemetery costs blamed on cost of living

Burial fees have gone up again, everywhere, all at once, and the explanation offered nationally, in a serif font, on headed paper, is the cost of living. Not any particular cost, and not any particular living. Just the cost of living, deployed the way a toddler deploys the word 'wind' when a lamp has been knocked over. It is the most successful sentence in British public life. It has never been asked a follow-up question and it has never had to sit an exam.

Nobody is disputing that things cost money. The country has been to the shops. What the country would like is a breakdown, and what it has received instead is a leaflet with a photograph of a hedge on it and the words 'Aligning Provision With Pressures', which is four words doing the work of none, printed in a quantity that suggests the leaflet budget is not aligning with anything.

"Everything feeds in," said a man from the finance side of things, who declined to give a name and offered instead a job title with the word 'strategic' in it twice. "Fuel feeds in. Labour feeds in. Pressures feed in." Asked what percentage of the increase was fuel, he said that figures of that kind could be misleading if taken out of the context of the figures, which he then did not provide, on the grounds that they were being finalised at national level by people who are also finalising other things.

Pressed a second time, he produced a chart. The chart had one bar. The bar was labelled 'costs' and the axis was labelled 'costs', and when this was put to him he said the chart had been signed off at a meeting in June and he was not going to reopen June.

A woman near the back suggested that before anyone went into the little pot again, somebody might have a quick look in the big pot, the big pot being the one with the flags round it and the ribbon-cutting and the gentlemen who refer to each other as colleagues. She was thanked. She was written down as 'noted', which in civic language is the same as being gently helped outside and given a coat.

A second official then clarified that nobody was saying the fees were high, only that they were now correct, which is the sort of sentence that has started more arguments in this country than any referendum. He said 'sustainable' four times in ninety seconds, then explained that the money goes in at the top and comes out wherever the top prefers, and that this is called a mechanism. Outside, a dog began barking and did not stop, and the paper is choosing to believe the two things were connected.

So the cost of living wins again, undefeated, never once required to show a receipt, while the receipts that would clear the whole thing up are apparently in a building with a lot of security. The rest of us are advised to convert our remaining feelings into tinned goods, tins being the last item in Britain nobody has yet told us is struggling.