About five months into full-time unemployment and oftentimes utter despair the inspiration occurs: the antidote to not doing anything might in fact be actually doing something. This had been gently suggested several different times in varying tones by an assortment of well-meaning loved ones. Nonetheless, the proposition reveals itself to me as if from nowhere, from the heavens themselves if not from my own genius: I will do some good old fashioned Giving Back.
‘Good idea,’ I say to myself.
So, I sign up to volunteer for the local wildlife preservation body with no less than absolute spiritual fulfilment in mind, but also willing to settle for a nice farmer’s tan to go with my newfound stoicism.
In the Borough of Tower Hamlets there is a cemetery park named Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. My bedroom overlooks this urban nature reserve, along with the other late nineteenth-century terraces that sit uniformly either side. Our house is ruggedly obscured by overgrown ivy and a tall, rather brutalised palm, irreconcilable to its surroundings despite many efforts to prune it.
I like this view. I like the sleepy fox who scales our fence to curl up for an undisturbed nap in the dense greenery. I like cemeteries, generally. My housemates joke nervously about how the location means we’re liable to be haunted. Nothing in life is certain but death and taxes, yet people are always shocked by both. For my own part, I don’t find graveyards sinister. Morbid, maybe; a little ostentatious, absolutely – but no more macabre than other stomping ground.
Arriving at the site, I’m greeted by a cluster of six women aged between 35 and 80. Standing slightly apart from them with an assured, wide-legged stance is Ruth, a cemetery ‘friend’ charged with directing the volunteers, who wastes no time favouring social niceties before divulging her own keener interests in the park, such as incidents of grave-robbing and what’s cheerfully known as baby-farming (there is a Wikipedia page – enjoy).
‘But now, on to the task at hand, I suppose. You are familiar with goose grass?’
‘Excuse me?’ After so much baby death I’m slightly jolted by the gear shift.
