You would think that a murder mystery writer would be well at home in a graveyard. This was put to the test when my mother decided that she wanted to see the tombstones of a number of poets she had read in her student days.
I'm not entirely sure what I expected she would want to do when she said she was going to visit me in London from India for a week. But traipsing through cemeteries was not one of them. But this is what she wanted to do (to be fair, she is a playwright and a literary critic, so -- perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised?) and so I was going to do my best to humour her.
What I wasn't prepared for was Kensal Green Cemetery. With 65,000 graves spread over 72 acres, and no map to guide us, I had to download a sketch of the churchyard by an amateur artist onto my phone and try and cross-check it with Google image searches of others who had visited these graves before us.
At that point, I did have a wistful wish that she was the kind of person that was happy with just seeing Big Ben and perhaps Lion King the musical...
That said, reading poetry over the remains of the artist responsible for the verse is the kind of mad thing we do in my family, and maybe this is what has given me my ability with words. So scratch all of that, no complaints from me!
Comentários