Swimming With Romanovs

 The Romanovs, my dream told me, preferred to use digital photography.

And then the scene shifted to a little rocky bay in the Med, with the Romanovs and a cockapoo puppy swimming about under the crystal clear water. Something came powering in from the open sea which I intitially mistook for a shark, but which turned out to be a white man in blackface. I pounced on him and playfully held his head under the water as if meaning to drown him....

Bunhill Fields 1

 Ailz, Margaret and I drove up to London to visit Bunhill Fields. On our way East along the M25 we passed through a snow storm.

Bunhill Fields is a burial ground for noncomformists, situated east of the city and north of the river in what once was open country. It was open for burials between the mid seventeenth and the mid nineteenth centuries- and is estimated  to contain 123,000 bodies. Among those buried here are John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake and- across what is now a road in a section called Quaker Gardens- 12,000 Quakers, including the Society's founder, George Fox. Adjacent to Quaker Fields is a Meeting House- where we attended mid-morning worshp and were given lunch.

Bunhill is supposedly a contraction of Bone Hill, a name the area acquired in the mid 17th century when it was used as a dumping ground for the bones that had piled up in the charnel house at St Paul's cathedral. 

This is Quaker Gardens, now a small park- with play area.  The building in the second picture is the Meeting House- or what's left of it. I gather it used to be bigger and grander but- just like our Meeting House in Eastbourne- it took a bomb in WWII.





And This is  Bunhill Fields





Bunhill Fields has an atmosphere, not eerie, a little melancholy perhaps, but peaceful. As Larkin said of churchyards in general it is "serious earth".  If the areas that are railed off appear neglected, it's because they're maintained as a nature reserve. It's a pity you can't stroll among the graves but it would be a greater pity if you trampled the plants, scared the squirrels and trod on the slow worms......