Nick Nunn column

Hardly a week goes by without a group of people somewhere in East Lancashire getting extremely upset about dead relatives - or rather the cemetery where their remains are buried.

Places where the deceased are supposed to Rest In Peace seem to have become the focus for endless confrontations between the bereaved and hapless councillors, officials and contractors.

A lot of the upset is not difficult to understand.

The continuous stream of cars going in and out of Pleasington Cemetery, and no doubt others right across the area, on Christmas Day and Boxing Day highlights how many people want to remember for a few moments, and pay their respects to, a lost loved one.

And you don't have to be hypersensitive (or even religious) to realise how shocked and angry any one of those people is going to be if they turn up to find the memorial has been disturbed.

It might have been damaged by hooli-gans or, much more likely, had a head-stone toppled' for safety reasons or crudely braced with tape and wooden stakes.

Or if the grave is that of a more distant relative you might have opened the paper to read your local council has decided to bulldoze it to make way for a road.

Then there are the regular rows over cemeteries where some jobsworth has deemed some pieces of ornamentation to be against "the rules" and arbitrarily removed them - usually from the grave of a child.

And it's difficult to think of anything more emotive than what is certain to be viewed as the desecration of a child's grave.

None of these are problems that are going to go away, for two main reasons.

First the councils and others managing cemeteries seem incapable of understanding just how strongly people will react to any tampering with the resting places of their loved ones without their knowledge.

Last week, for example, we were told by Blackburn with Darwen Council that "unfortunately due to the volume of graves involved at the moment (in having headstones toppled' for safety reasons) we haven't been able to contact all families."

That just isn't good enough.

And the comment also said the council would "make every effort to contact the person who bought the grave if the details are less than thirty years old."

Thirty years ago might seem like another era to a 26-year-old council official but it is outrageous that a local authority apparently considers that three decades takes us to a time before records began!

The second reason why these rows will not go away is that on this island (where we are already in trouble over landfill for our rubbish) graveyards and cemeteries are taking up an increasing amount of precious space.

Personally I'm quite happy to have an unmarked, cardboard box woodland burial or my ashes scattered somewhere nice (although that's fast becoming an ecological no no).

But we do have a long way to go before we sort out how to live peacefully with our dead.