Coffee table coffin had body in it, joked pensioner

A PENSIONER who uses a coffin as a coffee table in his lounge was visited by the police after two women saw it at his house.

Nick Fowell, 64, from Gimingham, near Cromer, Norfolk, said the coffin will be for his own use and that his lounge is the safest place to keep it. Mr Fowell said the complaint followed a visit from two voluntary service workers last week who did not take too kindly to his jokes about the coffin.

They reported their find to the police, who said the women claimed they had seen a coffin with flies buzzing around it.

He said: “I invited them in, not thinking about the coffin. Their immediate reaction was shock and disbelief. So to lighten the atmosphere I jokingly said ‘Don’t bother about her, it’s the quietest she’s been for 40 years and I’m enjoying the silence.’

“I said ’Don’t worry, she will go up the allotment at the weekend’ and they rapidly left.”

Inspector Mervyn Pollard, from Norfolk Police, said: “Social services went round to this man’s address and told us he had a coffin in his room and they referred to a bit of a smell and flies. They called us and asked if we could go and have a look at it.

“They thought there was a dead body there.” Inspector Pollard said: “It was a bit of eccentric behaviour and probably a little bit of a hoax.” Two police officers went round to see Mr Fowell, who suffers from arthritis, and asked him to open the coffin to check there was no-one inside.

Mr Fowell, a retired contract manager for a pest control company, said he bought the mock oak coffin earlier this year to plan for his funeral because he lives alone and has no family.

He said: “It would deteriorate if I kept it outside in a shed and neither of the bedrooms have the space.

“It makes a nice centrepiece and a different one. I use it as a coffee table.” Mr Fowell, who has asked Norfolk County Council social services for an apology, said: “I am absolutely appalled and totally and utterly disgusted at the sheer stupidity exhibited by some jobsworth of a social worker.”