LOSING THE PLOT

IN a quiet corner of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris lies Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, who died of heart failure in 1971.

If you blink you could miss it. Morrison’s grave is positioned like an after-thought, squeezed between the tombstones of others whose final resting place in that very Gothic boot hill is shared with the likes of Proust, Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde, along with the obligatory ravens.

It’s crowded but there is always room for one more. Maybe there is a lesson there for the Gold Coast. Just like our roads, perhaps we all have to give way a little and allow others to squeeze in.

Meanwhile the ashes of James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty in Star Trek, orbit overhead after being launched into space in 2012.

And the ashes of gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson are, like the Dylan song, blowin’ in the wind after being blasted from a cannon by his good mate, Johnny Depp, who played the role of Thompson in the 1998 movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, based on Thompson’s book of the same name. Depp is said to have spent $3 million on the ashes venture because, as Thompson’s widow Anita reportedly said, the writer “loved explosions’’.

Our city council will baulk at firing our dearly departed into space or from cannons, but it has to find a solution to a shortage of cemetery space – and soon.

The situation is dire at the Mudgeeraba cemetery in particular, or so we’re told. A report outlining the shortage and solutions has been redacted by council CEO Dale Dickson.

The word is the city will have to start buying additional land to expand, but a solution could lie in the new generation of towers being built. As reported recently, residents of a proposed 108-storey supertower planned for Southport could be born, married and retire in the building, which is planned to include a hospital, church and old folks’ home.

Throw in some catacombs and it would truly be a matter of “cradle to the grave’’.