Inspiration from the obituaries

I was reading the obituaries of the local paper and came across this fascinating entry:

Service at Shrewsbury
Crematorium, on Friday,
October 7, 2011, at 12 noon.
Dress code is fancy dress
(Funereal theme).

So many ideas came from this straight away - who was this man and why would his family want a funereal fancy dress cremation? What sort of conversations would the people have at the funeral? What would people say when they saw people dressing up to go to the funeral? Would someone go as the Grim Reaper? The moral of the story is sometimes the most interesting parts of a newspaper can be the classifieds - births, marriages, deaths, wanted adverts and for sale columns. If you're short of an idea try looking for something unusual in the back pages.

After all, the same newspaper that yielded this obituary also turned up

Wanted - one tonne of oats - cash sale