Living for Disco

My little sister did a meme a while ago – the one where you type your birthday into Wikipedia and see what went down on that day through the ages. I just had a quiet moment – god knows they are few and far between round here at the moment – and so I did it.

I won’t bore you with the details of whose birthdays I share, although I’m clearly born on an auspicious date for footballers, hockey players and racing drivers. Yawn.

The second best thing I found out is that my birthday is the day the UK’s first ever legal cremation took place. The story goes thus…

Once upon a time, in Wales, there lived a man by the name of Dr William Price. Dr Price was a little bit of an oddball, by all accounts. For instance, he refused to wear socks, and liked to roam the Welsh hills in the buff except for a fox-skin headdress.

Dr Price was also a card-carrying member of the druid faith, and therefore believed that burial was a sin.

So, in 1884 on the death of his five month old son, Jesus Christ Price (you have to admire this man – Jesus Christ? It’s probably lucky for him he didn’t live long enough to go the local school. He’d have had to endure years of tasteless crucifixion jokes, and would probably have become homicidal in his early teens) he attempted to burn the body on a pyre of coals, no doubt gathered from the nearest pit.

But wait! A hostile crowd had gathered, and as the pyre was lit, they stole the child’s body and ran off with it. Doc Price was a bit on the slow side, being 83 years old, and couldn’t give chase, although he was still sprightly enough at the age of 92 to father twins.

Anyway, he was acquitted of illegally disposing of human remains, cremation became legal, and when he died at the age of 93, he had a pyre all of his own. What a guy.

The best thing about my birthday, though, is that it’s the day that Chileans of all ages, all over the world, come together* to celebrate the Day of Sex and Pornography. There are no details, unfortunately, to explain how this is observed. If there are any Chileans reading, could you enlighten me please?

*no pun intended

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Miscellanea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.