Cemetery Gates
I was wandering through the cemetery earlier this evening (I am not the kind of person prone to visiting cemeteries of an evening, but the weather was nice, I was out for a walk and it rather led there through the meandering process that unplanned walks often take). Having been years since I was there, I took the opportunity to have a look at the rather large monument to local Victorian "grand-amateur" botanist/geologist Robert Dick. The monument is a grey-stone obelisk about 20 or 25 feet tall, and in one of the pavement cracks at the base someone had stuck a tiny, off-pink plastic rose.
This is of no interest to anybody, save Mr Dick, and he's been dead for 139 years.
However, this led me to wonder, who exactly leaves little roses at the graves of long-dead, obscure (and unpublished) naturalists?
What kind of odd soul, with a darkly romantic disposition and an interest in Victorian geology would do such a thing? I know that Elvis' grave is a tacky shrine, the grave of Marx in Highgate is visited by many a smelly Trot, and the resting place of Jim Morrison by thousands of people still writing awful teenage poetry well into adulthood - but a rose left for a baker-turned-scientist, who died destitute if not quite forgotten (the obelisk testifies to that) is quite another thing. What if there are roses at the graves of other similarly obscure local figures all over the country? Perhaps someone has made it their mission to mark all these nearly forgotten figures one last time before the endless tsunami of popular culture drowns the history of these genuinely useful people forever.
If I have made all this up, then maybe someone should do it. Quickly, before it's too late.
This is of no interest to anybody, save Mr Dick, and he's been dead for 139 years.
However, this led me to wonder, who exactly leaves little roses at the graves of long-dead, obscure (and unpublished) naturalists?
What kind of odd soul, with a darkly romantic disposition and an interest in Victorian geology would do such a thing? I know that Elvis' grave is a tacky shrine, the grave of Marx in Highgate is visited by many a smelly Trot, and the resting place of Jim Morrison by thousands of people still writing awful teenage poetry well into adulthood - but a rose left for a baker-turned-scientist, who died destitute if not quite forgotten (the obelisk testifies to that) is quite another thing. What if there are roses at the graves of other similarly obscure local figures all over the country? Perhaps someone has made it their mission to mark all these nearly forgotten figures one last time before the endless tsunami of popular culture drowns the history of these genuinely useful people forever.
If I have made all this up, then maybe someone should do it. Quickly, before it's too late.