What was your hobby as a child?
Stroll through Stirling Cemetery. I was drawn to that world of marble and moss; and the tombstones, some from the 16th century.
And did that matter to you as a child?
They are engraved with skulls and winged hourglasses, and the tools of the trade of the deceased. I liked those symbols and imagining what lives those people had.
And so the call of the story was conceived.
There are so many stories! In the seventies, a hundred people, including the leader of the Sex Pistols, John Lydon, jumped over the wall of Highgate Cemetery in London, hoping to find a vampire.
A vampire?
"We used to go to the crypts at night and open the coffins," the musician recounted in his memoirs. “We looked at the bodies that hadn't deteriorated wondering if all that vampire stuff was real. There were so many people doing the same thing that it seemed like a social club”.
Tell me another story.
On the south bank of the Thames there is a wild burial ground in one of the most expensive parts of the city. In medieval times it was the cemetery for prostitutes. They were not considered worthy of burial on consecrated ground.
But if the Church issued them a license to be sex workers!
But they were buried in a field. In the 19th century it was one of the poorest parts of London, and the wretched dead were dumped right there. In the 1990s, the story of building a subway branch was discovered, and people demanded it.
Because?
The society decided that these people deserved to be honored and turned the space into a garden where the Church asks for forgiveness every year on the day of Mary Magdalene and ceremonies are held. David Bowie, capable of celebrating difference, is his guardian angel, the angel of the outcasts, and he is very present.
Weddings are also held in cemeteries.
I attended one of these in the Bristol Cemetery. At the end, the couple were showered with rose petals that floated past them to the headstones of a married couple who died in the 19th century. There is an idea of circularity and continuity there that I like.
You have the soul of a poet.
I found the grave of a witch, Lilias Adie, in Fife, Scotland. She died in prison in 1704 after having confessed before the Church that she had had sexual relations with the devil.
What they would have done to him.
They tortured her to death. Since they had not been able to burn her alive and did not know what to do with her body, they decided to bury her under a large stone slab below the tide line so that the water would cover her grave, lest she return to take revenge. .
And has he returned?
In a way. It is now the only grave of a witch in all of Scotland. You can visit and a lot of people go. They consider moving it to a prominent place where it is valued as a valuable member of the community, a monument to not forget what was done to women accused of witchcraft.
What is the most visited grave?
I think that of Karl Marx, in Highgate, a mausoleum next to the grave of Adam Worth, the Napoleon of Thieves according to his tombstone, who inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to create Professor Moriarty, the archenemy of Sherlock Holmes.
A media graveyard, I see.
Buses of Chinese tourists arrive one after another. I find it interesting that the father of communism has become an emblem of the capitalist system. In the cemetery they sell you all kinds of Karl Marx souvenirs, even cookie cutters in the shape of his head. Marx would not have liked it very much.
The radioactive grave shocks me.
That of Alexander Litvinenko, the former spy who was assassinated in 2006 by Russian agents using green tea flavored with radioactive polonium. His coffin in Highgate is lined with lead, fear not.
Which one impacts you?
That of Mr. Mehdi Mehra, a very emotional story. He built for his son a garden tomb. In the center the statue of a child with a ball under his arm. Mr. Mehra is always there, chatting with people. People come to reflect.
What have you learned from the dead?
During the pandemic I would go for a walk in the cemetery and it would comfort me to think that they had already been through everything, it was as if they put their hand on my shoulder and whispered to me: everything will be fine. The dead are near.
His spirit pulses?
It's a feeling... that they are aware, that they feel, that we have them a foot away but at the same time we are separated from them, it's just a very deep impression that I have. Do you also feel something like that?
