Way to go!

Without wanting to appear morbid this week gave a couple of twists on what could happen when you die.

The first is the burial of Jimmy Saville, a rather eccentric (or should we say unique?) British pop personality that my generation grew up with. He died two days short of his 85th birthday and was buried in a gold coloured coffin; gold being one of his trademark elements. More interesting was his decision to be buried on the coast as Scarborough lying at an angle of 45 degrees. Apparently this was to allow him to see out to sea! My personal image is that gravity will eventually lead to him lying crumpled at the bottom of the coffin - hardly a  dignified end in my eyes.

NOTE: I considered erasing references to Jimmy Saville in this post, but on reading it I think the image of him left as a pile of crumpled bones in the bottom of an inclined coffin does seem to be appropriate and one I will leave here.

For me the  more interesting twist was on a programme called James May's Man Lab, a programme that sets out to help modern man relearn some of the vital skills that are now in danger of being lost forever.
This week in episode 3 of series 2 they entered the space race. Well, more accurately they demonstrated how could we cheaply venture into space? With the impracticalities of lifting a person into space and tight and proper rules about what can be done to/with animals, the team decided to take the ashes of a cat and a budgie as high as they could and scatter them.

The mechanism was to use weather balloons, one filled with helium and the other with hydrogen, deposit the ashes into each ballon so that when the loss of pressure at altitude burst the ballons their payloads would be deployed, and with camera-bearing gondolas hanging beneath that could both record the journey and transmit telemetry to monitors on the ground in order that they could track and recover the equipment. Recovery of the expensive camera equipment is the key to keeping it cheap, costing just a balloon and some lighter than air gas.

Of course they made this into a bit of a race between two teams and decorated the gondolas in the style of their passengers, but it worked remarkably well. After all this is a TV programme needing an element of entertainment, but in this case it seemed not to be out of place.

Both ballons reached an altitude of around 30km, the edge of space, before bursting and the cameras provided a great record of the flight and sights as they soared and, with an upward facing camera too, the moment of rupture and the scaterring of the ashes.

You can view a clip here. 

On reflection I think that when I go, and I hope it will be a long time yet, this last journey into space and the scattering of my ashes in whatever-sphere that is, is the way I would prefer. Of course a payload of human ash will be a little heavier so I might need a bigger balloon, but still...............