HOW clean is your grave?

Dirt busting duo Paul and Mandy Salem have started a unique business in Wilmslow offering a cleaning service to care and tend family graves.

The couple believe cleanliness is next to Godliness and are happy to take the graveyard shift, roll up their sleeves and become the Kim and Aggie to the afterlife.

The husband and wife team from Wingfield Avenue, Wilmslow, established Angel Gardening Services in November 2007 and have buried themselves in their new work.

They will pop down to the local cemetery to scrub down tombstones so clients can rest assured that their deceased loved ones can rest in peace and tidy.

Mandy said: "Where you can’t go down and tend to your loved one’s grave, we’ll go and clean it for you."

The couple offer a service to clean up headstones, tend to the garden and will even take a photograph for clients to see that their loved ones final resting place is spruced up to a good standard.

Mandy, 36, and Paul, 46, were both made redundant from their research jobs within a year of each other and made the decision to start the unusual family business in June, 2007.

Mandy explained how the couple came up with the idea for cleaning gravestones when they were visiting Paul’s parents in Tabley Hill, Knutsford.

She said: "We thought it was a shame about the amount of untended graves.

"Times have changed, people move away to work and can’t come to visit family graves as often as they like because they don’t live near by anymore."

"We thought a service which kept the graves tidy and clean would be ideal for these kind of people and no one else in the area is offering it."

The couple clean the head stones from bird droppings and algae, tend to the flowers and maintain the grave to the best standard possible.

Mandy said: "We can carry out yearly visits and special dates requests like anniversaries, and we can provide a fresh bunch of flowers when we go down."

The couple work closely with Macclesfield Borough Council and each church to ensure that full permission is obtained for the work to be carried out.

The couple have two children, Dominic 10, and Jordan, 6, who go to Gorsey Bank Primary School and Mandy would be delighted if they follow in their parents footsteps.

She said: "Everyone has been very supportive about the new business, the most popular reaction is ‘why didn’t we think of that?"

"With a surname like Salem we always like to celebrate hallowe’en so a lot of people have said how appropriate it is that we are now working in this business!

"We do take a lot of care in what we do and for people that are unfortunate enough to not be able to tend to their families graves we are there to help."

For more information on the angel gardening cleaning services go to www.angelgardeningserivces.co.uk