tickle flies from the skies: Meet me at the cemetery gates

I don't know why more people don't see old graveyards as valued destinations for a weekend's venture out into the world. Old graveyards are a place of life and history, much more than death - especially over here, where grave sites can stretch so far back in time and crowd over each other, and where many graveyards are also wildlife reserves.

Highgate Cemetery, East Cemetary

But you try to tell someone at work about your visit to the old graveyard over the weekend (Abney Park one week, and Highgate the next): "Yeah, a good weekend thanks, we went to this old cemetery."

"... Did someone die?"

Abney ladybird

Yes. Many people died. That's the point of cemeteries. "No, we were just looking around." And then I have to try and explain in a maximum of two concise casual sentences while they politely try not to flinch, without sounding like a creepy graveyard loiterer (I'm not creepy) over-defending my predilection for graveyard loitering. They're beautiful I say, and there's so much history. What I mean is this:

All old graveyards I have experienced have been beautiful. They have nice grounds, with trees and flowers and all manner of flora, which in turn house little creatures like birds and insects and, over here, grey squirrels. There is a balance between careful maintenance and letting nature run its course. I love ivy. I love the way it climbs and leaves its mark. Old graveyards are peaceful places and, especially in a big city, they provide a nice place to walk and dream, either in solitude or with a companion.

Highgate

The stones and tombs themselves are works of art, testimony to human skill and design, and testimony also to human emotion. These stones represent memories and histories and beliefs. People bothered. They tell the nearly universal human story of our desire to be remembered as individuals, and to remember. They can tell histories of families, and histories of places - what kind of people lived here? Who was the population? How did they choose to represent themselves once they were gone? And of course, there are the famous people, whose tombs often attract people. These small monuments become symbols of what that person did and represented to the world in their lifetime.

And they are also liminal spaces (thanks Anth 101). This is part of the reason some people tend to avoid them - they're a space to help ritualise and protect us against the mysterious, dangerous transition from life into death. But I rather like liminal spaces. I don't feel tied down to being a thing in a liminal space outdoors. I feel like I can just drift and dream in between, let my thoughts shift about in the breeze, enjoy being outside and myself. There's no one else to worry about in such a liminal space, no expectations (real or imagined, from others or myself) and no clear end to time. Time goes on in a cemetery.

Or I could just play them this song by The Smiths, which has some other good points in it:

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people all those lives, where are they now?
With the loves and hates and passions just like mine
They were born and then they lived and then they died.

Many people, though, just can't get past the corpses-skeletons-dead people thing. "They just creep me out. I even shiver going past a graveyard on the bus!"

Abney

Cripes. As many zombie movies as you watch, and ghost stories you read, and vampire thriller romances you make up in your head, the dead are not going to come back to life. Probably.

Still, there are also a lot of people who do stroll through cemeteries without necessarily having a person they knew to visit. Some of them are visiting history and figures - like Karl Marx, like George Elliot, like wonderful Douglas Adams, all in Highgate Cemetery that we visited on a beautiful sunny Saturday. Others are just enjoying art and architecture.

Abney chapel

In Abney Cemetery, Stoke Newington, which I believe we also visited on a sunny Saturday, there is a beautiful old chapel somewhere in there centre. It's now old and collapsing and out of use, but it was built originally as a non-denominational for anyone to hold a service for their departed. Today there is a big wide fence around it (covered with the anti-climb paint that covers so much in London) to stop people getting in and potentially being hit on the head by crumbling bricks. There is corrugated iron over some of the entrances, and most of the glass has come out of the windows. Bits of lead curl and twist uselessly from the old windows, and a vine is climbing all over it. But is is beautiful in its disrepair, as it would have been when it was first built.

Apparently these two cemeteries are part of the Magnificent Seven. There may be more dreaded sunny days to occupy.