Et In Arcadia 'Ere We Go.
I go for walks now. Its the thing I do instead of exercise. It is at least movement and I figure that's better than the alternative: a softening, thickening sedentary lifestyle that involves me lying on a sofa and drinking wine like one of the more crapulous Roman emperors. My grape peeling days are behind me and as I shuttle haplessly towards my fifties I'm working on my default setting being able-to-function-after-ten-o'clock-at-night. So I've stopped drinking and in time, once I feel more settled into this strange new world, I'll attend to my diet. In the mean time I go walking.
Where I've been going walking is Dundonald Cemetery. Its about twenty five minutes from my house and its quite large, especially if you drift all over it like a restless spirit as I do, so I can usually walk with purpose for an hour and a half before I get home. Which is how long I want to walk.
I like Dundonald Cemetery. Its old, it rises up to a copse of trees in the middle which is ringed by gravestones. There are little pathways, grassy rivulets between the graves that meander down toward the less popular, more corroded stones. There is never anyone there and its always slightly raining so I can flap about in my big coat listening to The Killing Moon and feel as though I've been lashed to the mast in a storm. Its on higher ground and it's exposed so the wind is often up. I feel like I'm striding manfully into a Turner painting.
As I walk I take a note of the names of the dead. Hanna. Orr. Boyd. Leckey. Hill. Beggs. Nesbitt. Seeds. Purcell. They are the same names as the people I know from Belfast. There are even Catholic names here, which surprised me. There is no Nawaz, however. And no Higgins either. I find that odd. I thought that Higgins was a pretty common name. It comes in two varieties: an Irish one and an English one so you double your chances but no. I am unrepresented in East Belfast graveyards.
Some of these graves are very old. Some have cracked like a poppadom, which I always found eerie growing up, as though it were definitive proof of the undead. Now I find it sad. I don't know what causes it, possibly vandalism or more likely subsidence. There's very little vandalism in fact, though someone has dumped a chest of drawers in the bushes down the far end of the graveyard. It has clearly been there for some time. The graves have been there longer. As I'm leaving the other day I see a small unlovely grave: just a plot with a small rough headstone, no bigger than the floats you used to get at the swimming pool. I could make out only the name "Peters" and the first part of the date which told me Peters had been there since some point in the 19th Century. Quite by chance there was a small bunch of three or four plastic flowers that had been dropped on the pathway close by. I picked them up and placed them on Peters' grave. And I thought how strange and beautiful the world is sometimes, what an infinitely complex set of coincidences led me, an Englishman in pink desert boots, to place imperishable flowers on the grave of a stranger who has been dead for a hundred years. I didn't bring the flowers, they were a gift and it just so happened they dropped next to a derelict and near silent grave, a grave that had caught my attention because of its meanness and inscrutability. It felt as though I just had to lay them there and stop for a moment and think about a dead man or woman who perhaps hadn't been thought of for a century.
I went back to the cemetery today. The wind was up, there was a gentle mizzle and Can's Little Star of Bethlehem sounded amazing in my head as I edged toward The Fighting Temeraire. I trekked all over, eventually swinging by Peters' grave. My bouquet was gone. It had been cleared away or returned to the grave it should have been on. My little floral tribute had been swept away.
That chest of drawers was still in the bush down the bottom of the graveyard though.
Where I've been going walking is Dundonald Cemetery. Its about twenty five minutes from my house and its quite large, especially if you drift all over it like a restless spirit as I do, so I can usually walk with purpose for an hour and a half before I get home. Which is how long I want to walk.
I like Dundonald Cemetery. Its old, it rises up to a copse of trees in the middle which is ringed by gravestones. There are little pathways, grassy rivulets between the graves that meander down toward the less popular, more corroded stones. There is never anyone there and its always slightly raining so I can flap about in my big coat listening to The Killing Moon and feel as though I've been lashed to the mast in a storm. Its on higher ground and it's exposed so the wind is often up. I feel like I'm striding manfully into a Turner painting.
As I walk I take a note of the names of the dead. Hanna. Orr. Boyd. Leckey. Hill. Beggs. Nesbitt. Seeds. Purcell. They are the same names as the people I know from Belfast. There are even Catholic names here, which surprised me. There is no Nawaz, however. And no Higgins either. I find that odd. I thought that Higgins was a pretty common name. It comes in two varieties: an Irish one and an English one so you double your chances but no. I am unrepresented in East Belfast graveyards.
Some of these graves are very old. Some have cracked like a poppadom, which I always found eerie growing up, as though it were definitive proof of the undead. Now I find it sad. I don't know what causes it, possibly vandalism or more likely subsidence. There's very little vandalism in fact, though someone has dumped a chest of drawers in the bushes down the far end of the graveyard. It has clearly been there for some time. The graves have been there longer. As I'm leaving the other day I see a small unlovely grave: just a plot with a small rough headstone, no bigger than the floats you used to get at the swimming pool. I could make out only the name "Peters" and the first part of the date which told me Peters had been there since some point in the 19th Century. Quite by chance there was a small bunch of three or four plastic flowers that had been dropped on the pathway close by. I picked them up and placed them on Peters' grave. And I thought how strange and beautiful the world is sometimes, what an infinitely complex set of coincidences led me, an Englishman in pink desert boots, to place imperishable flowers on the grave of a stranger who has been dead for a hundred years. I didn't bring the flowers, they were a gift and it just so happened they dropped next to a derelict and near silent grave, a grave that had caught my attention because of its meanness and inscrutability. It felt as though I just had to lay them there and stop for a moment and think about a dead man or woman who perhaps hadn't been thought of for a century.
I went back to the cemetery today. The wind was up, there was a gentle mizzle and Can's Little Star of Bethlehem sounded amazing in my head as I edged toward The Fighting Temeraire. I trekked all over, eventually swinging by Peters' grave. My bouquet was gone. It had been cleared away or returned to the grave it should have been on. My little floral tribute had been swept away.
That chest of drawers was still in the bush down the bottom of the graveyard though.
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