Forever 63 no.

In the early 90s I would open the batting for the 2nd XI of our age group at school. At 12 I set a high score of 52, and that year averaged about 26; a very respectable score for a young team of sloggers would often make under 100 in a whole innings. That year, 1993, was by far the high water-mark of my cricketing career.

Our practice nets were a row of 10 outdoor netted corridors, half astro-turfed, with an all-weather mat at the bowlers’ end, one at the batsmens’ end, and a patch of overgrown grass in between. During a routine practice session our opening bowler Sanjay Dindyal decided to emulate our heroes in the West Indian team, and bang one in short. The ball caught the far lip of the batsmens’ astro-turf where it was sunk into the soil, and spinning forward, the ball looped high up in front of me, and suddenly dipped down. I attempted something between an ambitious pull shot and an automatic facial self-defence. The result was closer to a 19^th century circus act as I instead opted to catch the ball with my teeth. That’s something you just can’t teach, you either have it or you don’t. I didn’t, and I remember to this day, 20 years later, the slow motion image of my tooth arcing out of my mouth as I span anticlockwise on my back foot and the little white missile floated serenely forwards, landing about 15 feet up the pitch. James Stern, batting in the next net, first in surprise and then laughing said “give us a smile Rob”, and I did, a big bloody toothless grin. I don’t remember it hurting at all. We were kids, up to high-jinx, and the whole thing was quite a laugh. I knew I would have a good story for life.

The damage was this: both front teeth were severed from my jaw. Pushing the defenestrated tooth back into the shrunken, in-pressing gum hole was at that time the most painful thing I had experienced. Both front teeth had deep root canal surgery and are now drilled into my jaw. Being dead, they gradually blacken and periodically they have to be dyed from the inside out. For many years I was extremely self conscious of my smile, as my front teeth will always be a slightly further off-shade than my already very off-beige English drinkers’ ivories. The much worse damage was that the school introduced the compulsory wearing of helmets for child-batsmen. I asked them not to, and instead to simply astro-turf over the whole length of the nets. We don’t play cricket on a pitch with two inch-deep ridges running cross-wise, so why were we made to practice on ones? A schoolboy does not, until they have developed physically, have the speed or power to fire down a proper bouncer, not without the aid of a ridged pitch. The school could see that rather than upgrading to inherently safer and more accurate facilities they could pass the expense onto the parents by adding equipment to little Timmy’s kitbag.

I played on for a few more years, never with a helmet as it felt cumbersome, uncomfortable, and above all unsportsmanlinke, and perhaps because of this I stopped at about 17 when the bowlers had become men, 6ft tall with furry faces and broad palms. They chucked down the ball too fast for me. Against full-size butch sportsmen I simply didn’t have the reaction time, let alone the physical or mental toughness, for cricket.

That’s not even the only cricketing accident we had. During a school match at 15 I remember seeing David Bloom, also playing for the under 16 2^nd XI, knocked unconscious in the field at short leg, when a misthrown ball from the outfield landed on the top of his head, rather than in the keeper’s gloves. He was felled for about a minute. It happened quickly and I don’t think it ever got mentioned again. Had the accident, god forbidden, been fatal, would we have introduced helmets for fielders? Now that an umpire in an amateur match in Israel has died after being struck by the ball in a freak ricochet accident, is umpire's safety to be regulated too?

Now when I see little batsmen of 10, keen, proud, lively, playing cricket wearing preposterously vast protective gear, helmets making them look like a team of sporty Frank Sidebottoms, I feel guilty. It would have happened anyway but at that moment it was my bad batting, poor technique and naturally slow reflexes that led to, in our little corner of London, the sudden advent of pampering over hardiness.

Cricket is a tough sport. The first thing you notice when you handle a cricket ball is how hard it is, like lightweight concrete. Mentally the game is tougher: even at the schoolboy level a game goes on all day. It is inevitable that someone will lose concentration at some point over the 7 hours. We play sports for health, but also for risk. A sport is a choice that each one of us makes to play. It’s fun, exciting, alive, to take risks, grow, strengthen, discover, and there must be setbacks and injuries as part of this process.

If Philip Hughes, and perhaps eventually Sean Abott, had known that their aggressive and exciting let alone normal style of play would cause future players to be made to play in riot gear, in an attempt to snuff out all physical risk, they would I hope be disappointed. They played because they liked the drama and excitement, and they were and are extremely tough men. Broken fingers are pretty regular in cricket. Taking it on the bonce, the chin, in the ribs, they don't like it up 'em. Out in the middle for hours on end. Sledging, taunts from around the bat. Heat, sweat, fear. I was neither tough nor particularly liked the risk, so I stopped playing. As a university student in Scotland, cricket didn’t really figure on the agenda and I took up golf, an excuse to get away from women for a stroll in the countryside with a side-issue of competition.

Parents hate their children sitting indoors playing computer games all day, but a boy playing cricket in an environment without risk is an open-air computer game. We have helicopter parents who endlessly protect their children from all forms of living risk, in a guilty bid to induce unbreakable dependence. I hope that cricket’s rulemakers don’t lose their heads and render this sport of tough bastards into, as Vic Marks put it, rugby without the tackling.

The Spectre of Reality: The Non-Catholic Cemetery, Rome

Two views of the beautiful Non-Catholic Cemetery, with the pyramid in the background, before the dawning of the brutal reality

The Non-Catholic Cemetery appears at first sight to be idyllic: intricate, bright and green. The tombs are tightly packed, reminiscent of the Tikhvin Cemetery in St Petersburg. Tall cypress trees add the most beautiful verticality to the horizontal rows of tombs: trees which really strain upwards like gothic spires, or needles injecting the earth into space, the mortal into the spirit world. The ludicrously picturesque Roman pyramid of Caius Cestius abuts one wall.

The cypresses, towering over the tiny gravestones, vaulting like the columns of a gothic cathedral above floor slabs .

A Piranesi drawing of the pyramid of Caius Cestius

It is also a cemetery of eclectic peoples, beliefs and symbolisms. Keats is buried in one corner, and Shelley too. Gramsci, father of Italian communism, Marxist atheist and closet Christian, is interred near the ossuary, his grave garlanded with red flowers and red ribbons. Many of the gravestones are truncated or collapsed columns, indicating the grave of a child or young person. Amongst the gravestones can be found several Stars of David, including the Fischer brothers, buried beneath the same stone: one Christian, one Jewish. Orthodox and Lutherans, Cyrillic, German, Greek, Estonian and countless other languages and denominations lie side by side, interlaced in a unified non-Catholic firmament.

The shared stone of the Fischer brothers, with cross and star


The tombs of children and the young, symbolized by half-finished columns


A grave reading only: "Mother"

In spite of endless solicitations for donations and claims of being on the brink of collapse, it is easily the most industriously maintained cemetery I have ever seen. It took a while to realise, washed over as I had been by the graves of the poets and the scent of the pines that, staffed by tireless and ruthless volunteers, this cemetery is a deeply restless and intrusive place.

As I walked around, perfectly intact graves were being scrubbed, renovated, and even dug up; plants and trees were being uprooted and re-planted; lengths of hose, wooden planks and electric drills could be seen and heard. I was told that a large grant had been squeezed out of the German Embassy for the continued upkeep of the ‘German grave’, which was being brutally power-hosed and re-carved, and that the Cemetery committee was now pushing the Russian Embassy for cash to renovate their national memorial. So much for resting in peace.

Remains being exhumed

Perhaps the most ruthless example of this hard-headed intervention in the cemetery’s fabric is the inexorable exhumation of the remains whose families have not kept up with the required payments. On burial, a family can choose to buy the plot in perpetuity, or to buy a 30-year lease after which time their family will be asked to extend or the bones will be moved to the ossuary and the plot made available to the next customer. The cemetery committee wait, like parking wardens, for your time to expire. The volunteer relayed to me, utterly neutrally, how a young woman had come seeking her grandfather’s grave. She had seen a photo from the 1940s in which her father was standing by his father’s tomb. The young woman was told she was too late: the body had been dug up, the tombstone gone, his bones in the ossuary. The volunteer said they had either failed to contact anyone in the family or whoever they did find wasn’t interested. Little consolation to the man’s grand-daughter, who had made the personal pilgrimage to Rome to find and remember him.

Only a few years ago my family discovered that my great-great-grandmother, someone about whom we knew little, was buried in the Ancient Jewish Cemetery on the Lido in Venice in 1913. We were eventually able to find the grave, collapsed and overgrown, forgotten for nearly a century. Visiting, discovering her, was a privilege. We went on, as a family, to remove the ivy, have the collapsed columns and split flagstone fixed, and have new ironwork wrought. I know that at least materially it, she, will last till well after me and my children have forgotten it. No such privilege would be afforded us in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. As I walked around I came across two graves currently being dug up. I felt deeply sorry for those descendents who would come to seek their family in glorious and romantic Rome, the eternal city, and search in vain, finding corporeal reality in the place of sacred history.

Before and after: the tomb of my great-great-grandmother at the Jewish Cemetery on the Lido, Venice. On the left, as we found it, nearly destroyed; one the right, nearly finished. Not improved, but repaired.

As if perpetual interference in the repose of the dead were not enough, here the living must suffer it also. The sound of Rodrigo’s guitar concerto was wafting over the fragrant pine air. What was going on? What were those blocks hung on the walls of the cemetery? Not speakers? And then: “Ladies and Gentleman, the cemetery will close in 15 minutes, please make your way to the exit…”. Does the willful intrusion upon the peace of this cemetery never end? After five minutes of Rodrigo the guitar faded into a midi Air on a G-String. Over the next 15 minutes the announcement repeated multi-lingually until the we were informed that “the cemetery is about to close…”, and the large and expensive-looking electric iron gate, beeping and flashing like a reversing lorry, started to shut. It felt like some faceless public space: an airport or supermarket, where the presence of the individual is deliberately negated. We, mourners or pilgrims, were being treated like interlopers whose presence was resented but unfortunately necessary, herded around as if the intricate and personal symbology of making memorials were some material process like shopping or checking-in. Imagine if such invasiveness reared up during a moment of profound private contemplation. In spite of all the glamour of being buried in Rome, I would hate to be here.

Unfortunately, maintaining or repairing something is not synonymous, as the cemetery’s current crop of meddlers seem to think, with improving it. To maintain a grave is to stop it being destroyed by time; but to improve a grave, on the other hand, is a concept bordering on the oxymoronic. You can’t improve the grieving or memorial process. A cemetery should be a place of rest and calm, not one of change and improvement. Improving is not interchangeable with planning for the future: these improvements serve only to violently introduce the terrestrial present to a place where this reality should be excluded. Cemeteries are for us to remember the dead, to reflect upon them and upon us. They could be grand like Verano, wild like Highgate, intense and historic like Tikhvin, alive like Oaxaca, but they must allow in some way the dead to rest and the living to engage with them. To do this they should nurture a sense of timelessness, allow the past to continue to be somehow just also present, where the gossamer membrane between the bereaved and the deceased is momentarily dissolved. A cemetery should somehow act as a metaphorical rope-bridge which momentarily and temporarily allows us to cross over to the other side, be present there, and return to reality. In this resting space a psycho-spatial fissure opens in which the living can make communion with the dead. It must allow us to develop inside of us a place where we can locate our memories and feelings for those we have come to see, letting the spectre of reality loosen for the visit.

It seemed to be really fundamentally getting death wrong to treat a cemetery as a kind of pet project for a group of bored expats, an extended ornamental garden onto which to project merely contemporary tastes onto what should be a lacuna beyond time. Being deep-cleaned, power hosed, renovated, replanted and modernized drags the cemetery out of the timeless sacred and into the mundanity of the present. The despoilment of Shelley’s tomb is a gross example. The spectre of reality has infringed on the actuality of non-existence. The dead are beyond our human need to update and re-enliven. To re-introduce the real world into this place where living reality must be suspended is to deny the dead their identities, and in so doing, deny the role of mourner or pilgrim too. For who is a mourner if the deceased is stripped of the existential properties of restful death? This cemetery’s future is not secured by its zealous upkeep, but endangered.

Oaxaca Cemetery, Memento Mori

The cemetery in Oaxaca, Mexico, carries this inscription above its tall wrought-iron gates:

Postraos: aquí la eternidad empieza, y es polvo aquí la mundanal grandeza

Bow down: here eternity begins, and here mundane greatness is dust.

For whom is this profound observation made? What does it tell us about the attitude towards death of the people who built this cemetery? It is certainly the exact opposite of the Cimitero del Verano in Rome. The Verano tries to beguile us by its claim that death is not sufficient for mortality: that as we live, we can also be dead.

In Oaxaca, in the wonderful Mexican unmorbid fascination with death, the cemetery is not a memorial of achievements in life, but a perpetual memento mori, a reminder of mortality. Montaigne suggested that we should live overlooking a cemetery and never forget that this was our universal destination, echoing Ecclesiastes: “do not all go to one place?” This too is the Oaxaqueñan affirmation. Nothing remains of our earthly glory, not here, but dust. The cemetery itself is the ultimate leveler, in which the same fate awaits all and everything. In a necropolis like Verano on the other hand, the cemetery is filled with the vanity of individual greatness, a greatness which tries to generate a social order it had had in life.

We visited Oaxaca during the Day of the Dead. One evening we asked the hotel receptionist where he was going that night, and he said “To the cemetery, to have dinner with my grandfather.” The cemeteries in Oaxaca, at around midnight, are a riot of noise and colour. In one corner groups of mariachi bands were playing, sometimes in competition. On the other side, cramped under a candle-lit catacomb-lined colonnade, a full orchestra and choir were sweating their way through the Mozart Requiem. Some people were dressed-up festively as skeletons while others had come plainclothed, alone or with family, to an ancestral tomb to meet and remember the dead. Over some graves families ate picnics, over others pagan-catholic rituals were being performed. A pram, covered as all babies seem to be in Mexico in a large and thick fleece blanket, had been parked atop one grave's slab.


Each and every gravestone is garlanded with cempasúchitl, the orange and pink marigolds used only during Day of the Dead, and with ribbons, candles, sugared skulls and papier-mâché skeletons: there is no such thing here as an abandoned, forgotten tomb.


Skulls and skeletons are everywhere, hanging from rear-view mirrors instead of furry dice, as cakes, as masks. Outside the cemeteries are funfairs with dodgems, shooting arcades and candyfloss, full of dressed-up children and adults well into the night.

Above: A Day of the Dead procession, a comparsa, from a local school. As well as devils and skeletons, corpse brides were the most popular costumes. Right: This little Dracula was particularly convincing.

There are many comparsas run informally and institutionally. As well as these for children were wild midnight processions with allegorical characters and mezcal flowing freely.


The Day of the Dead has both a public and a private aspect. It is a national holiday, a celebration and a spectacle, a party which has the effect of reclaiming death from the mystical realm and placing it firmly into the processes of life. It is also a time in which personal mourning is condoned and encouraged. Privately, away from the crowds, or during the day, people engage in genuine acts of remembrance - eating together as families with the deceased, talking, drinking, feasting, dancing, laughing, praying, all at the grave itself.

If only we were as uncynical about the macabre. Then perhaps, as the hotel receptionist in Oaxaca had done quite naturally, I could have dinner with my own grandma, by her stone and her yew, in a Sussex graveyard. I would be thrown out by the neighbourhood watch. Like Foucault’s essay arguing that the Victorian obsession with repressing sex was in fact evidence of their compulsive perversity, is not equally the determination to back away from death evidence of a paralysing and obsessional morbidity? Is it more morbid to want to actively remember the dead, or to forget them and shrink from any such memorial communion? The more an activity is tabooed, the more attention we draw to this activity. To fudge our response to death reveals a greater and more abnormal fixation than to embrace it. We owe ourselves to be honest and positive, to demystify death, place it as a part of life, and cast off this embarrassment of communal remembrance.

One great print by Posada, the Mexican artist who effectively created the calavera images of dancing, living skeletons, is headed by a poem:

Gran fandango y francacela
De vivos y calaveras
En el Panteón de Dolores
Con música y borrachera

Great salsas and revels
Of living and skulls
In the Graveyard of Sadness
With music and drunkeness.

The extraordinary juxtaposition of intense grief and solemnity and wild careless abandon is one of the great and unique characteristics of Mexican life and culture. The closest equivalent is the Irish wake. While a wake is given for the deceased only once, Day of the Dead is an annual and nationwide act of remembrance. Perhaps because wakes are the sole condoned opportunity for 'positive grieving', they often tip from the celebratory into the nihilistic. The finality of the moment encourages the desire of drinking oneself too into oblivion.

Expressed in cemeteries across the country on November 1st through this deeply historic quasi-pagan practice, such 'positive grieving' is not taken literally to be communication with the dead like some macabre graveside seance. While transubstantiation may be possible according to some, literally contacting the dead would be nothing but superstitious esoterica. But positive grieving (such as partying on a grave) is not esoteric at all because it is not literal: it is symbolic and therapeutic. It is a reflective act of re-incorporation and closeness, a friendly way to remember parents and grandparents, to maintain the community of the family across the divide of life and death. They have the courage to acknowledge that this community always exists, and that it is far stronger than the filigree membrane of being alive that separates the bereaved from the deceased.

For whom the cemetery?

The bell tolls for thee, not because you will die, but because you are alive.

It must be commonly understood that our rituals of death are no longer done for the dead. Maybe they never were. Ancient cultures, on the surface, performed rituals on their dead whose purpose was to assist them in their ongoing journey into the afterlife. These were rituals of preparation, providing the deceased with tools, weapons and bribes to see them through whatever would follow in their new quest - the quest for eternal peace, a peace which was not automatic, but had to earned in death as success had had to be earned in life. Once Christians introduced the fixed polarities of heaven and hell, the afterlife became a question not of journey but of destination. No longer were careful rituals of preparation required, since once the soul had crossed over to the other side there was no further doctrinally-verified journey to the final resting places of the dead. The dead Christian was faced with an instant judgment instead of an ongoing journey: his inverted meritocracy had sealed his destination already. He will arrive at the pearly gates to find his name already inscribed in one book or the other. There was now no space for the hero to battle his way into Elysium. Accordingly, the elaborate rituals of the pantheists and pagans were no longer needed and elaborate and morbid rituals of taboo performed at the point of death started to disappear.

Now, in the beginning of the psychological age, it is legitimate to say that all rituals for the dead are done for the benefit of the living. These rituals do not prepare the dead for their own afterlife, but prepare the survivors for their own life after the life of the deceased. Rituals form a symbolic closure to existence, and prepare the living for the journey of bereavement. Everything we do for the dead is not for them, but for us. This by no means belittles it: in fact I think it gives our actions in the face of this unknowable state a particular propitiatory poignancy. But it does mean that we can see, in our treatment of the dead, a reflection of ourselves. What we do for them is in fact what we do for ourselves, and is therefore what we want or need. Through actions for the dead we expose our own values and define our self-identity. In this light, what do we find out about ourselves in the remaining rituals surrounding death? What do we respect about ourselves in the way we respect our dead (even that we respect our dead)? And finally, what is our relationship to the necropolis and the cemetery, something we claim for the dead, but we make for the living?

The bell tolls for thee, not because you will die, but because you are still alive.