Country Mouse
Merlin the dog wanted to explore the village graveyard. Since his decks had been cleared (so to speak) at the start of the walk, I thought I would take the risk.
A new plot had been dug by the JCB gravemaster and, as I reflected on the high quality of the extracted greensand, I realised I was getting the first twinges of what the Young call FOMO - Fear of Missing Out.
It’s 30 years since we moved to the village and, in that time, nearly every available slot on the sunny side of the graveyard has gone, many of them to non-villagers who, unlike myself, had the vision and foresight to book ahead. A bit like the Germans bagging sunloungers.
With only a maximum of 12 plots left on the sunny side, should I use this wake-up call productively and make an overture to the Chief Influencer of the village, namely the churchwarden?
I recalled the doorstep interchange Mary witnessed some years ago between this Influencer and our late next-door neighbour Bert. After ten years of non-speaks, Bert suddenly bared his teeth into a smile as the churchwarden passed his cottage and made a pleasant conversational overture.
A decade’s long silence had been broken. The row had been triggered after the churchwarden replaced the tinsel, wrapped by Bert’s late wife around the pulpit, with garlands of ivy she found more tasteful. From that moment on, Bert and Dolly made their feelings clear by watching Songs of Praise on Sunday nights (and singing loudly along) rather than worshipping in the church itself.
‘How come Bert’s being friendly again?’ Mary asked a village old-timer who had been delivering logs by wheelbarrow and was a co witness to the pleasantness. ‘He probably wants to book his place in the churchyard,’ came the jaundiced reply.
Bert then was my age now. He was thinking ahead. But very few of my contemporaries have given any thought to their Final Destination. Sixty per cent of Britons have not even made a will. Other than a wry smile at the thought that, before he made it, Rod Stewart worked as a gravedigger, my generation has largely banished the whole business to a mental back boiler.
I blame the infantilisation of the public by successive governments. They are now warning us to carry water on the tube; renaming accidents (including suicides on train tracks) as ‘incidents’, and ghouls after motorway pile-ups as ‘onlookers’; marking our children’s exam papers with inflated grades; congratulating our third-rate talents with honours for trivial achievements like cycling; and rewarding us for over-eating with bariatric surgery.
How will the current generation, the Snowflakes, cope when its members start to encounter the Grim Reaper? Will they need trigger warnings as they enter their sixties? Will they try to sue someone?
Short-term thinking has been the order of the day for so long that Mary has often charged me with being unable to think ahead.
Come to think of it, what arrangements have I made myself? Oh yes, I remember. I am opting for a pagan ceremony in a wicker coffin woven, ideally, by young offenders on community service, from my own sustainably managed osier beds. But as for where I want to be laid, maybe not the graveyard in this village.
It’s a pleasant enough spot. With the predicted ban on glyphosate, there’s every chance that tall, flowering nettles and poppies will soon wave over every grave, attracting small tortoiseshell butterflies and commas in their droves.
But, unlike Mary, I have no emotional connection to this village church – although I would go more often if there were any danger of it being turned into a bijou residence.
I need to make my feelings clear as I wouldn’t want to end up like an old friend. He had pronounced – verbally, but not in a legal document – that his heart was set on being buried in the family vault in Carmarthenshire. His children failed to honour the diktat and had him cremated instead, with the ashes divided between three of them and scattered at random locations convenient to them. They got the wrong end of the stick, confusing ashes with wedding cake. ‘He’ll be turning in his graves [sic],’ observed one old friend.
If Rod Stewart would auction his services as a gravedigger to raise money for Comic Relief just think of the prestige for the grave occupant. But then, as Rod recently admitted, his PR had spun the story. He was never really a fully-fledged gravedigger. As Rod says, ‘There were a couple of Saturdays up at Highgate Cemetery, earning a few quid by measuring out plots and marking them off with string. You learn a lot about yourself, doing physical work. And what I learned about myself was that I didn’t like doing physical work.’
Well, I do like doing physical work, if not the mental version. There’s no need for a JCB gravemaster to dig my plot. I can dig the hole myself and have it ready.
‘Shall I do it now, Mary, while I’ve still got my stamina? You can’t say I don’t do anything useful in the field. It would be a huge saving for you. You can’t say I don’t pull my own weight.’
‘I am opting for a pagan ceremony in a wicker coffin woven by young offenders’