Low Strangeness

Sometimes people just don't see the true weirdness right in front of them.  Take, for instance, a story I read on the BBC website the other day about claims that pornography was played during a Cardiff funeral.  I must admit that, when I first saw the headline and read the story's synopsis, I thought that they meant that pornography was actually part of the ceremony, instead of music or one of those valedictory videos summarising the deceased's life.  leading me to suspect that the funeral might have been that of a porn actor.  All of which would have been pretty weird in itself.  However, upon reading the story, I realised that this wasn't the case.  As it turned out, the story concerned an incident at a Cardiff crematorium where some relatives of a man who had tragically died, with his son, in a car crash, were shocked to see what appeared to be an adult film of some kind playing on one of the screens behind the priest as he conducted the service.

All of which is still weird, not to mention pretty traumatic for the relatives concerned.  But what really struck me about the incident, as reported by the BBC, was that the priest leading the ceremony was none other than the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe.  Yet the report made nothing of the fact that the one time presenter of Fortean TV, noted writer on the paranormal and pseudonymous author of countless pulp horror and science fiction novels, Lionel Fanthorpe, was presiding at a funeral where such an extraordinary event took place. Now that's pretty weird - that an expert on weirdness should be present at a weird occurrence.  In fact, it's exactly the sort of incident one might expect to see reported on in the pages of Fortean Times under the heading of 'synchronicity'.  But clearly, nobody at the BBC has ever read Fortean Times.  If nothing else, the story at least confirms that the Reverend Fanthorpe is still alive - he's been pretty quiet in the Fortean world for some time.  It seems only fitting that he should come to public attention again for being involved in an outbreak of what might be labelled 'low strangeness'.