Crafting precious memories into meaningful celebrations
A life is more than the sum of its individual parts – we exist in community. As your personal funeral celebrant, I will help you honour and celebrate the unique life of your loved one and the richness of relationships that surround them.
As your celebrant, I am first and foremost there for you. Having lost close friends and family myself, I am familiar with loss and grief and can bring the compassion, support and guidance that such a time requires.
The ceremony will be 100% your ceremony. I will take the time to carefully listen to you, while gently guiding you through the process to create something truly individual that authentically honours and celebrates the life of your loved one.
As your personal celebrant, I can play as little or large a part as you wish. Whether planning and leading the complete ceremony, writing a bespoke eulogy or helping you to write your own, reading testimonials on your behalf, through to assisting with selecting music, readings and creating a photographic tribute, I will be there for you.
My accreditation by The Academy of Professional Celebrants means I am expertly trained and comprehensively insured, bringing you peace of mind that your loved one’s life story is in safe hands and will be treated with dignity and respect.
With a background spanning church ministry, creative communications, journalism and community work, my career has centred around listening to, shaping and creating, then successfully sharing the unique stories of companies, products and people.
As a result, I have decades of experience of not just getting the story right in the first place, but also ensuring that is told in the most authentic and engaging way possible. My father’s passing was the first time I saw this in action from an independent funeral celebrant. It brought home in the most meaningful way the value that a genuinely caring and skilled professional can bring in difficult times. The ceremony they crafted with my brothers and I, and then delivered, left everyone feeling that my dad was present in the most precious of ways.
It became the inspiration for my own journey to train and put my decades of life experience to use doing the same for others.
A funeral/memorial ceremony is very often the last time a loved one’s unique life story is shared publicly in a gathering of friends and family. All the more reason to get it right, and to do it and your loved one’s memory justice.
As your personal celebrant, I will help you draw out the key elements of your loved one’s unique life story, those beautiful and meaningful interactions with the life stories that it overlaps. I can also help put into words the potential of a life story which may have tragically never been fully realised. You can be reassured I will then effectively and creatively deliver this meaningfully and respectfully, thanks to my many years of public speaking experience.
Outside of work, the celebration of the unique lies at the heart of many of my passions.
I love music and have been writing and performing original songs for over 20 years. I am also an established papercut artist, an interest I share with my wife, creating one-off art works that have featured in a number of galleries and exhibitions. My love of music and art overlap in the many years I have been capturing unique moments in time as a live music/theatre photographer with work published at a local and national level.
My wife Helen and I have 4 grown-up children between us, and when we’re not at home in our woodland cottage with our menagerie of cats and chickens, you’ll find us at live music gigs, exploring the South East on our mountain bikes, or seeking adventure overseas whenever time permits.
I am based just outside Groombridge and cover Crowborough, Tunbridge Wells & the Kent/East Sussex border