Craziest last wishes don't always go to plan

HE WANTED to be an actor so consigned his skull to a Hamlet production.

THOSE who don't specify what they want done with their bodily bits and pieces when they're finished with them risk what happened to a Yank farmer. He survived a tractor accident but had a leg amputated. His relatives thought he'd want it to have a decent disposal so they popped the leg into a silk-lined miniature coffin and buried it in a solemn funeral service. He's still going crook at them - says he'll have to live out the rest of his life with one foot in the grave.

Then this character in Oxfordshire, England, wanted to be an actor so much that when he died he'd willed his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company to be used in Hamlet. The bequest, not one you get every day, went to the Home Office. It was given the go-ahead but, alas poor Yorick, the frustrated actor still didn't get on-stage - the skull gathered dust in the props room when there were no plans for any production of Hamlet.

A London schoolteacher who couldn't care less what happened to him, asked for his ashes to be 'consigned to any convenient dustbin for refuse collection'. He didn't get his wishes. The will wasn't read until he'd been dead three months and the ashes had been planted under a hydrangea bush where they did more good than if they'd become landfill on the rubbish tip.

Less useful fertiliser was provided by the Pom woman who, when her vacuum cleaner gave its last gasp, buried it under a rose bush in her garden. "It was the least I could do for such a helpful wee friend,” she told a London newspaper.

The richer they are, the more expensive the request. A well-heeled Texas woman sought to be buried in her lace nightgown sitting at the wheel of her Ferrari. Seemed an awful waste of a good motor car, to say nothing of a fancy nightgown, so the proposal went to court. A judge ruled that if she wanted to be well-dressed and speed in a fast car to wherever it was she was headed, she was entitled to do so.

The woman was laid to rest looking her best and 'with the seat slanted comfortably'.