Good folk of Forfar: Alan Hattel would like you all to know he's not dead despite what it says on his tombstone Like the unfortunate soul who finds himself being loaded onto a cart of plague victims in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a bloke from Forfar in Scotland has had to declare himself "still alive" after finding his name on a headstone in a local graveyard. Speaking to Dundee-based newspaper The Courier, 75-year-old Alan Hattel …
Dave Swarbrick, the fiddle player, on reading his obituary in The Daily Telegraph: "It's not the first time I've died in Coventry."
I was born there and spent 20 odd years living there, sod bombing Slough, Forfar should be higher on the list.....heck the Gallowshade estate featured on a Scottish Executive publication on "failed housing developments" alongside Sighthill and other "rough" areas....its Forfar's Ghetto in many respects, often due to the local authority dumping their problems there "out of sight and out of mind", the primary school that serves that area has a lot of kids with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome....which is really telling...
"Spike Milligan's epitaph includes the phrase Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite, Irish for "I told you I was ill."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Milligan
"His words of wisdom was voted ahead of Oscar Wilde’s "Either those curtains go or I do" and Frank Sinatra’s "The best is yet to come" by a considerable margin.
One in 10 voters chose Wilde's while seven per cent voted for Sinatra's.
Next was Mel Blanc's "that's all folks", followed by Frank Carson with "what a way to lose weight’ while Winston Churchill was next.
The former Prime Minister finished sixth with: "I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
This post has been deleted by its author
Yeah... my first though was something along those lines. I suspect he may just not be very popular. Perhaps he made a faux pas so terrible at a party and dug himself a metaphorical hole so deep that people have essentially buried him alive. I always worry I'll do that one day.
I've never prematurely buried an ex before. Wish I'd thought of it.
The Burns Unit - Since We've Fallen Out
You've quit town
Ahead of me
We've fallen out
At least on this we're agreed
So don't come around
No checking up on me
Since we've fallen out
I've been left here to seethe
And your enemies
Became my closest friends
Since we've fallen out
Fallen right over the edge
My patience wore
And my temper thinned
Since we've fallen out
Never to make up again
Never to make up again
Such a waste of a friendship
Since we've fallen out
Spiralled out of existence
So forget that we happened
I've picked over the bones
Since we've fallen out
I've tortured and torn
My soul from its core
My soul is ripped from its core
Since we've fallen out
I don't believe anymore
At the first funeral that I ever attended I was the grave digger, pall bearer and mourner. For the sake of his family I'll be vague with the location.
I was in a foreign country working as a gardener and just after lunchtime was told to go and dig a grave. A priest on holiday had died and due to local religious practices had to be buried before sunset, it was a Friday. Another chap and I set to digging but there were many large stones in the soil, so by the time the coffin arrived the grave was only four feet deep.
The next problem was that we only had one short piece of rope. I jumped into the grave and lowered down one end of the coffin whereupon everyone reverently stood back a pace. As his wife was there I did not want to stand on the coffin to escape the grave, it does not look good! I had to ask someone to help me out.
R.I.P.
Yes but to be even more pedantic - he could have been born in Fife (making him a Fifer) then moved to Forfar. Is Fifer status permanent? Would that make one a Fifer Lifer?
Presumably when the gentleman in the article does pass on, he’ll be with his Forfarthers once again.
For years made their living out of stories about devil worshippers, homophobic hate and smear campaigns, paedophilia scandals,
Paper is thin as cream cracker now and subscription dropping rapidly, so they are trotting out "you can't judge our reader numbers just by the papers we sell"
Latest pieces of bigotry - hounding and harassing a gender neutral councillor, whipping up transphobia, whipping up a "scandal" about a bdsm club with a mainly homosexual membership (it previously was a gay sauna) and AFTER the owner politely invited them in for a look around and to try to set the record straight that it was an adults only private members club for both genders or none. Next week - MSPs call for "GAY SEX CLUB" to be shuttered, when in reality they picked 1 elderly MSP who offered some mealy mouthed comments on the matter, due to the ick factor "I'm fully in support of folk doing what they want behind closed doors, but councils are trying to get rid of sex venues etc etc etc" (ignoring it's not a sex club like a strip club or a lap dancing bar, but instead a private club where consenting adults go, pay a membership and entry fee and indulge in activites with other consenting adults, owner is strict about behaviour policies and has stated he has and will remove anyone not following the rules, has information sessions with health workers, provides free condoms etc, trying to whip up a belated "scandal" about gender neutral toilets in schools despite them having been in operation without any issue for SEVEN years and in fact have reduced bullying, vandalism and other disorder markedly (gender neutral being individual cubicles with floor to ceiling doors and walls, so wholly enclosed with a central sink area, schools report no complaints, students the council has talked to have no complaints about it, yet the paper quotes one transphobic busy body screaming "think of the children" "there's a cover up going on" "the girls will too afraid to speak out" etc etc etc, when thats utter and total cobblers.
A lot of the non bookface local pages even comment about how much of a joke their reporting is, often bearing no resemblance to reality and its no wonder their readership is in terminal decline...
I'd rate the Sun as a more accurate "news" source than The Courier any day of the week (ditto for its sister papers Evening Telegraph and the "Sunday Post" (readership in free fall down to sub 100K copies sold in total)
Perhaps Mr Hattel should consider a dedicating a Memorial Bench in his memory!
"Alan Hattel is still alive"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50646467
I quite liked..
"In memory of Miles Kington, who hated this spot, because there was never anywhere to sit down and enjoy it from"
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
