Eternal Life is now on my trail
Got my red glitter coffin, man, just need one last nail
While all these ugly gentlemen play out their foolish games
There’s a flaming red horizon that screams our names - Jeff Buckley

In a brave move to save the environment save myself from the nightmare of the London underground I tend to walk to and from work everyday. It’s only a brisk 40 minutes promenade. Every so often I go through Bunhill Fields. It is an amazing secret lost in the heart of the City - a public open space which used to be a cemetery for dissenters and non-conformists. According to this page, it’s the last survivor of London’s once numerous small burial grounds.

And it’s the most heartbreakingly lovely place to walk through: on a couple of acres are hundreds of really old graves and tombstones surrounded by all kind of animals, and old people who feed them. I have seen squirrels numerous times, as well as cats, magnificent crows and what I still maintain to be a dove (and not a white pigeon). The birds are usually silently meditating on top of the grave, napping on top of human flesh and decay.

People walk their dogs there - today a young man was walking with Niki, his adorable 12 weeks husky friend who, he said, had been “very naughty” recently. I know because I was ear-dropping on his conversation with an older woman while pretending to pet the little furry animal.

Two weeks ago daffodils started to bloom and I can’t wait for them to be all over the green space. On the benches there’s always people napping, eating breakfast and chatting, and right next to it there’s a green space where little kids from the next-door school take their supervised recreational breaks. I’ve always found it quite weird, to see all the kids playing in a burial ground, those people sipping StarBucks, those couples cuddling under the shade - all of them surrounding by, well, corpses.

But see, that’s the interesting thing about this place: it is not gloomy or frightening at all. On the contrary, I would go as far as saying that it’s one of the prettiest and most enjoyable places I’ve found in the city so far.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that William Blake is buried there? Even if I am more a Baudelaire type of person, a touch of poetry is always welcome.