The Cemetery

I sat in the cemetery - my favourite cemetery, and one of my favourite places in the world - yesterday, and tried to think of advice I would give to anybody, just general good advice. It’s odd that I love a cemetery so much, but over the last few years it has really come to be my place of solace. My favourite place to sit there is on a stone bench, right beside another stone bench that says “keep your chins up”. The first autumn I experienced in Portland, my strongest memory is of the leaves cascading down in this cemetery. I’d never seen anything like it - England’s autumns are wet, and London is less leafy than Portland. I remember thinking that it looked like a video game forest, with the perfect golden glow around the branches, and gently falling leaves, and bright grass.
I love to read the gravestones. I feel a kinship with more than a few, who are marked as starting life in France, or Germany, or Japan, and who ended up here.