Sunday, 13 July 2014

Grave Matters



One of the many striking things my friend Anastasia noticed when she visited Père Lachaise cemetery was that hundreds of people (or perhaps one person hundreds of times) had left big smacking lipsticky kisses on Oscar Wilde’s tomb, so that eventually, to protect the surface of Epstein’s great monument, the authorities put up a glass screen.

Something similar was done in Spain to protect the tomb of Generalissimo Franco, but there the problem was not kisses: it was the thousands who went specifically to spit on his grave.

When Margaret Thatcher was buried some people felt her grave to be too modestly sized — it should have been large enough to dance on.

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